MJD

twitter on PHP? http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/twitter_on_scala.html youtube is PHP? http://digg.com/programming/YouTube_is_almost_entirely_written_in_Python Twitter was on Ruby but they had great problems scaling it. That is one of the reasons so many major sites use ASP.NET - its massively scalable. PHP also has no native support for unicode (well it didn't last time we looked at it) a problem if you have clients delivering content in Arabic, Chinese etc. Facebook is probably the biggest site on PHP, but appears only the front end runs this (with something a bit heavier behind the scenes). Of course most people using PHP are fine with its abilities - they don't need massive scalability, or native unicode so these aren't issues. As to why people still use classic ASP - its because it works for them. We use ASP.NET for new sites, but there is a load of classic ASP code out there that works just fine.

We had a client with such a system, and several front ends located on various different hosts. Images were named to match with record IDs in the db (eg 1.jpg, 3245.png, etc). The obvious way was to just link to the images on the site they were uploaded to. So each of the several front ends pulled the images from a single site. But this was trickier because not all the records had matching images, and they might be either gif jpg or png. When it was all hosted on one server we could check whether a file existed, but it was harder to do this remotely (and would have been much slower). So what we did was have the remote sites call an ASP page on the site hosting all the images... eg img src="http://sitewithimages.co.uk/showimage.asp?id=3245" This script looked for an image called either 3245.png, 3245.jpg or 3245.gif and showed it, else it returned a single pixel blank gif. It works fine, means client only has to update images in one central site, and avoids storing the images in a database.

I'm a web developer who built my first website in 1995 at uni and have been working in the field since 1996. We started off on Apache with Perl, but we now use exclusively microsoft platform since around 2000 - some "classic" ASP but now mainly ASP.NET. We love ASP.NET! We're now at cloud computing solutions too.

Couple of .net carts - both very easy to setup Cart: nopCommerce Cost: free ($50 to remove link back) URL: www.nopcommerce.com (open source) Cart: kartris Cost: free ($840 for enterprise version) URL: www.kartris.com (partially open source, but richer features and more polished than nop)