Re: PHP vs ASP.NET "formal opinions" request

I'm not so sure it's an entirely horrible idea for a university to focus on one area over another. I went to art school - so I'm sure I'll be burned at the stake for having comments :P But a great deal of my friends who took comp sci or comp eng in uni are greatly unemployed - why you ask? Their school taught them how to use, program in, administer, and setup Linux Red Hat 7.3, then 8.0, and they just got a glimpse of 9.0 before graduation ... cool right? Funny thing is that a surprising number of businesses and corporations would much rather you be proficient in some manner of Microsoft product - the reason? If it breaks there's someone you can call for help. If your Windows Server blows up - you dial a very expensive Microsoft number to get help. If your Linux server running some manner of PHP script blows up, you send out countless emails to mailing lists hoping someone out there in the open source community has had to deal with something similar to what you're doing now. By no means am I saying that MS is a good thing, but from a corporate atmosphere - it's very difficult to get the upper management types to see why anything other than Windows 98 should be on a computer. Although, I say go for making Linux a good thing ... goto netcraft.com - there you can type in the names of any of your favorite websites, commercial or corporate, or anything really and it'll tell you what web server their running and wether or not PHP is installed (well, in most cases anyways). The best would be to find out what the favorite sites of the boss-types are and just hope they're all run by PHP :P At 08:39 PM 8/10/2003 -0700, you wrote:

--- Douglas Douglas <replaceafill@yahoo.com> wrote: In my University, people in charge of approving the graduation works advocate Microsoft's technologies. They don't believe in the free software movement or the open source movement. Some guys tried to develop a system using PHP and those people made them change to ASP.NET. They say because "It's the future". According to them it's where the money is. It is disappointing to me that a university exists that focuses on where the money is rather than educating students. While I disagree with their prediction of the future, I think it is irrelevant anyway. If they were to choose PHP based on its promising future, it would be a better choice but for the wrong reason (the "right" choice is to let the students choose their platform, since it should be irrelevant to the lessons being taught). Of course, my argument is moot if you are speaking of a vocational school or something that is intended to teach applied skills, but I wouldn't call such a school a university. These types of educational institutions are great, but they have a much different purpose. I would rather a university let the students choose their own platform, since people are going to be most passionate about learning in an environment that they choose. Besides, as I mentioned above, the platform should be irrelevant. If you want to teach students to learn to program for the Web, you have failed if they cannot apply what they have learned to any language - PHP, mod_perl, ColdFusion, Java, etc. To answer your original question, I suppose you can search zend.com for some sort of comparison, but I am afraid you may be wasting your effort. It sounds like your university has some fundamental misnuderstandings about education, and that is going to be difficult to resolve. Good luck. Chris ===== Become a better Web developer with the HTTP Developer's Handbook http://httphandbook.org/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php