CommerceCubes

Developing Intelligence: The Question is ASP.NET or PHP?

I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to figure out what would help me more so in the development of BizCandy, ASP.NET or PHP. I finally had a chance to talk to a friend of mine this weekend, Bruce, who is a .NET Developer that lives up in Peterborough, Ontario. He was able to give me the different perspective that I needed to come to a decision on which programming language would be best (and most robust for what I am creating).

Here are my Criteria for the system I am building…

• I wanted advanced Reporting and Analytics features that could be expressed via the web
• I want something that is tricky to reverse-engineer (Trip up any competition i may and will have)
• I’d prefer to work with a pre-existing library of objects (why bother re-inventing the wheel?)
• I wanted to incorporate the MS Business Intelligence Tools from SQL Server 2005 into my app if possible

Naturally I am not going to give away everything but that is the basics of what I wanted from the language I decide to work with. I realize that as more business owners come to involve technology in their everyday businesses that questions like these exist (and probably much simpler ones too!) I am strong in PHP/MySQL but I haven’t touched much Microsoft Development since College a few years ago. For what I need the application to do and how it needs to run I am leaning towards ASP.NET/.NET Development because of the robust nature of their libraries and the ability to use SQL Server 2005 in the development process.

Brower Cross Compatibility – Who is your Audience?

This is a big issue for me. I need the application/system that I develop to be cross-platform compatible. If you are not familiar with the term “Cross-Platform Compatible” basically what it means is “can everyone view my application?” And if so, “Can they view it the same way?” Now some of you may be thinking “okay, that’s silly. If I develop a site or application for my business everyone can see it” and this is a silly assumption to make. The point is that some people (possibly the people looking to talk to you about your business) don’t all have the same browser running on their computer. Back a few years ago I can remember that some sites wouldn’t load on an Internet Explorer browser (Microsoft) if they were PHP scripted and vice versa. You want people seeing your site or application when they search for your site so this is something to definitely think about. After all if you don’t then your competition will and the rest is history.

Now I personally am NOT a fan of Microsoft by any means but they’ve managed to do a few things right that the Open Source Community has to play catch-up on. I like what open-source does for small businesses now and I see more and more of them moving to this platform because of one big thing… COST! So you may be asking “Okay Luc, why are you ready to get all .NET’ed” and the truth is that for some things Open-Source cannot touch Microsoft can. My business deals with analysis, tracking and reporting aspects and to be honest I’ve looked and found little to no information that would help from the open-source community

Ownership – Intellectual Property

Microsoft is loved and hated because of how it can help some to create and maintain Intellectual Property aspects of development. Naturally the whole thing with Open-Source is that the people own it and it can make it harder to sell a business built around open source code because of a simple question “Who owns what code?”

Scenario A – Open Source Application Development

You develop a system or a business built around the code of an organization like WordPress and how I’ve developed this blog. You build in some special functionality to your site and change the architecture of your WordPress blog and turn around and try to sell it for some serious money. Sure you own the ideas you’ve developed but you don’t own WordPress or the base blogging software. This means that your competition can come out with something better and knock you out of the marketplace to lick your wounds.

Scenario B – Fully Owned Application Development

You develop an application to meet a specific set of business needs in ASP.NET 2.0 with the use of a library of Objects from the ASP.NET library. Now you don’t own the objects that you use and interact with but the code that you do own is yours, it’s not open-source in the least. Any specific queries that you develop are yours, the application as a whole is yours though it uses a library of pre-built functions that everyone can use. (Similar to the idea of a “Knowledgebase”)

Again it gets tricky when it comes down to “who owns what” in the application development world so I strongly suggest that if you have any questions you should consult an attorney.

Note: I am NOT an intellectual property lawyer and if you have any serious questions about intellectual property please consult a lawyer.

Personally I’ve spent about the past few weeks thinking about this and trying to reach a decision for the BizCandy Business that I’ve been developing. It’s been confusing because as much as I’d like to do this in Open-Source it just doesn’t seem to prove to be that feasible to do it this way. I am personally excited to learn more about .NET, ASP.NET 2.0 (Personally I don’t like the whole ‘2.0’ thing at the end, what’s that all about? It sounds too much like Web 2.0… don’t get me started!) and SQL Server 2005 with the BI Toolkit. Stay tuned here for more updates about that in the coming weeks.

Writing an application is a lot like writing a book. The best authors know their audience and write for them, that is why they become “best selling” authors while others write about what solely interests them.

Lucas

Writing a Best-Selling Book NOT a Book 2.0