PHP v.s. Apache::ASP, embperl, Mason?

Hello, I am a web programmer, and I am trying to evaluate these four technologies so that I can figure out which ones are better in which situations: - PHP 4 - Apache::ASP - HTML::embperl - HTML::Mason I have tried searching Google, but could not find any comparisons between these languages. For example, the PHP FAQ gives comparisons against ASP (Microsoft ASP, that is), Cold Fusion and Perl, but not the three other technologies listed above. If I went up to a programmer who uses one of those languages and asked what its major strengths are, he would say something like "support for include files", "built-in functions for form handling", "free and open source", "easy to put scripting in an HTML document", etc. But all four of these languages have those properties. So, I am wondering if anyone can shed some light on these questions: - How do they compare, speedwise, assuming they are all properly tuned? - How easy are they to program on? Do any of these languages have a significant shortened development time versus the others? - How widely supported are they in terms of webhosts? Here is the (very limited) knowledge that I have found so far: - PHP seems to be supported just about everywhere nowadays. But the other ones are just perl modules, so if the machine runs Apache and has those modules installed, they can be made to work by editing .htaccess. - embperl has some shortcuts to make database and form processing simpler. -Philip Mak (pmak@aaanime.net)