WordPress runs on PHP, and PHP runs on Apache, this blog uses PHP and Apache to serve up content, and .NET doesn’t. So whats the point then? Well, for all intents and purposes I have a technology that can be used to develop and maintain large commercial websites without having to change to a .NET hosting provider. The point being that while I love .NET I cannot really develop commercially websites with it unless I pay for extra hosting and in these lean economic times I cannot see myself paying more money for hosting. That means that I have to rely on technologies such as PHP.

I have been reluctant to use PHP simply because the software tools available cost money, such as Zend Studio, but I did find PHP Development Tools as part of Eclipse and today I started doing some basic PHP stuff, and its amazing to see how easy it is to adapt to PHP if you have used C#. The syntax is very similar. One of the biggest differences between PHP and .NET is the way pages are handled. .NET uses postbacks, and all the .NET code is compiled, not interpreted. PHP on the other hand interprets its code and the way it basically works is that Apache passes a request over to PHP if it detects any PHP. The PHP interpreter then executes the PHP. As far as syntax goes PHP is similar to most programming languages. Features such as assignment operators and conditional statements are similar.