As many web developers are aware, there are a myriad of ways to develop websites and interactive web applications today. On the server side, one typically chooses from one of two technology stacks; the “Open Source” and the Microsoft. Disregarding political and license concerns, they really are very much equal in core capability. The Open Source stack typically consists of A Linux distribution as the Operating System, Apache as the Web Server, MySQL as the database, and PHP as the server-side language. These can also be installed to a Windows machine as well, and Apache has modules that even allow the use of .NET technologies via the Mono runtime. The Microsoft stack consists naturally of Windows as the OS, IIS as the webserver, and ASP as the core server-side script. ASP itself, of course, supports a number of languages; you can use JScript, VBScript, or a .NET language. Both of these platforms provide a myriad of tools at your disposal. LAMP allows you to leverage the wealth of Apache modules and use a large selection of programming languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, and of course PHP. The Microsoft Stack makes use of the very powerful SQL Server, and is particularly scalable to large operations. Of course there are variations of these; obviously MySQL could be swapped out for PostGreSQL, or even a remote SQL Server.

Costs

The cheapest hosting plans for most WebHosts use a Linux-based stack. This makes PHP one of the more accessible server-side languages to learn. When I started this sight, I wasn’t really sure how well it would turn out, what I would write about, or how much exposure it would give me or my various programs. After three years, I’m still not entirely sure of that; but at the time, I was working predominantly in Visual Basic 6. I was stagnating, and I didn’t even realize it. When starting the sight, I really had two choices- go with the Linux stack, or the Microsoft stack. My choice of the LAMP stack was done purely for a single reason: it was completely foreign to me. That may seem like an odd reason to choose a technology, but I’m always up to a challenge. I won’t try ot say that learning the “Linux way” of doing things was easy, but it did get easier over time. With the server itself of course I didn’t have full access anyway; just a standard CPanel, and I still do; but understanding Linux, Apache, and MySQL were very helpful in using PHP, which was the language I had to learn to get teh site off the ground beyond a few ugly static webpages.

I basically slogged through learning PHP, in an attempt to create a relatively simple CMS. After getting a basic CMS and some crappy side links started, I decided to redesign the site from scratch. I sketched how I wanted it to look on paper, and then set to work duplicating that appearance using the available web technologies, as well as through the use of Photoshop for the various images I needed. The end result is what you see on the main page; of course I’ve made changes to it since, and added features to the underlying CMS to support new functionality such as listing my youtube videos and different categories of items, but the visual appearance is much the same. I toyed recently with the idea of redesigning it, but decided that it could stay as it is now a little while longer; a redesign is a rather big undertaking, and I like how it looks now.

Since then, I’ve also learned and become quite adept (If I may say so) at C#. This has left me rather- annoyed- when I use PHP, which feels very messy in comparison to what is generally a very clean working environment. Not to mention being relegated to having to debug using echo, which I can’t say I really missed from using GW-BASIC.

I did install a MS Stack locally some time ago, and experiment with it for a short time before deciding to avoid it; I reasoned that if I was to use C# for web development start to avoid working on my PHP site even more. I’ve since changed my mind, however; I’ve decided to install a local IIS-based server and experiment some more with what .NET has to offer on the server-side. I’ve been able to make some pretty fine-looking stuff with WPF and Windows Forms, and I know WebForms as well as the Base-Class Library that is not heavily leveraged on the client side are one of the many areas where my abilities and knowledge can be expanded, so I can’t see why not.

Also, I’ve always thought it a bit weird that my site ran on PHP and I focussed mostly in Windows-based and MS technologies and languages. Though I don’t see a switch over occurring anytime soon.