i looking forward to develop an online booking system, such as ticketing booking system, car rental system or hotel booking system...

i have a bit of XHTML, XML, asp.net, vb.net, java, ColfFusion, etc experience... i'm looking toward to write a stable and easy maintainable web site for this... i saw a few websites using PHP... do PHP give better support for database, plus hiding the code from users, and can easily automate all the modification (add, delete, change the current record) so that the layout can be as expected?

I have no experience in PHP before, but i'm willing to learn anything to have a good website. any ideas which one is better? Hope somebody can give more explanation on this or maybe further breakdown the points... many thanks

asp,jsp,asp.net also can do the same lar ...
it's all depend on your skill

what are u try to achieve at first place? develop one to sell to companies or for school assignment ? both have different expectation to meet ..

use .Net
i did it last time with C#

ASP.NET IMO easy for u...C# or VB u choose lo..

free 1 sure php+mysql

college assignment i did using asp.net
but currently now doing in jsp, java.
So is up to u to weigh which field you're stronger and which one you're more confident

let just assume it is not for college assignment... are you all sure that asp or jsp can hide the code from users ha? i mean when i open up the 'View > Source> from the toolbar, i dont want to show the underlying coding.. the user can only see the normal HTML tag...

rukawa: since you have experience in asp and jsp, which one you think more suitable for, let's say commercial use? Can it handle a lot of querry? high transaction at a given moment?

Sheeeng: we meet again here... what is the adv of using C# or VB?

shinchan: what you mean last timeyou use c#, now no more? why? no good ha? need some opinion... classification...

thanks ha all...

Use whatever you are most experienced with.
About hiding the application code, you don;t have to worry... im sure NONE of the programming languages outputs the application logic when creating the page.

If you decide to use ASP.NET, use ASP.NET 2.0... 1.1 pretty much sucks. Did it for a college assignment too and had to find workarounds for many things.

And on top of that. There are many open source portal to grab free source codes. Unless your one are exceptionally good , else it will not entice for steal.

ok ok... what you all means PHP is free? why others is not free? dont understand ler...

you can download PHP for free
you can download MySQL for free
you can download the apache webserver for free
you only need a text editor to build PHP scritps, those are free too.

Everything you need to work on PHP is available for FREE. The only thing you might need to pay for is the hosting, but i recommend you do your development on your own computer first. Faster that way.

For ASP.NET you need to have IIS, the .NET framework. There's a free tool to use to develop the application (webMatrix) but compared to Visual Studio its pretty crap.

So for ASP.NET you have to pay for
- Windows
- Visual Studio

And then you will need to find a hosting company that provides Windows Servers instead of *nix. Unlike PHP, ASP.NET will only run on servers which have the .NET framework and that means you need a windows OS.

Sure we can get it for "free" by pirating.... but that's not the right thing to do.

ya.... pirated is not the right things to do... sorry... before this i'm used to play with pirated software, and never think of any charge incurred.... hahaha... at least now if i'm going to do anything in professional way, then i need to respect peoples' software before expecting people to respect mine!

ok... my friend said jsp is better support and more powerful than PHP, any ideas on this? i'm not writting a web page very powerful... just consider that i'm gonna write something like lowyat forum, dealing with a lot of different different querry and to be displayed in different different layout, depending on the way user want it to... and i also hope that in the future, i can easily maintain the web site in case i wanna add in new features, different layout but same data, etc....

everything going to start around end of Feb...

i've done development on PHP and JSP before. both are nice, but i find PHP you can find supporter better. last time i do JSP on OC4J with Oracle, aihhh want to look for help also so difficult.

actually which one are you more familiar with? go with the one you're more familiar.

do not want end user to see the code, even the html tag??? try flash lorr like that....or if u heard about Flex 2.0....can try that as well.....

normally a simple JSP and ASP will do the job as all ur business logic will not be at the UI.....

Just wanna add something...

Visual Studio Express is free (until November 2006)
SQL Server Express (SSE) is free
.Net Framework is free
ASP.Net can be run on *nix using MONO (never experience it, so can't really comment)
ASP.Net can be run using Apache (with some tweaks)

There also Oracle Express if you want to try (but still in Beta)

You can choose the combination of PHP+Apache+MySQL or JSP+Tomcat+MySQL or ASP.Net+IIS+SSE

thanks for the useful advice...

it would be easier to pickup PHP than JSP

you can't see asp/jsp/php code from the browser.

when a browser asks a webserver to give him a scripted page, the webserver will take the page and based on the configuration it will interpret the page then only pass to browser.

It can, but its also a major PITA to get working, even then you can't be 100% sure what you wrote is going to work. Not to mention the difficulty of finding a web host which uses both *nix and MONO to support your .NET application.

anybody experiences in using C#? i heard that C# is an OOP, hard to code, but easier to maintain... what about PHP, is it OOP also? JSP and ASP leh?

i'm going to write something that might seem small at the beginning, but i will put in a lot of considerations so that it can be extent easily in the future... My friend told me that using OOP, you can easily add in additional features, etc... is that right?