What to choose - Jsp or asp or php etc. Building a website with following features?

Its a professional website with


1) normal pages having pictures, that change dynamically


2) a great search algorithm within own database of website, and or network of websites.


3) buttons that change with pages


4) blogs/forums


5) add/invitefriends, make network(its not basically a networking site)


6) use flash/swf


7) suave looking/ easy maneouvering between pages.





i am guy who does know c programming, but nothing related to web designing(except html), i know jsp is sun's baby and asp is microsoft. i am asking, who will do my job best, and how.





also


can any geek here let me know how template at link


http://www.finerdesign.com/website-templ...


be made, is it only flash, specially the effect the cursor makes on menu icons.





any guys who knows things, and can help me genuinely, can email at ankit7 at gma il.

What to choose - Jsp or asp or php etc. Building a website with following features?
i like Steve's answer the best. he gives accurate information without "bagging" on one platform over another, as he clearly states that any of the platforms you mention will easily handle what you are trying to accomplish.





tiggsy's answer although biased and tainted, is also helpful if you were looking to use php, which is the ultimate "poor man's" web development platform. to say that php is "more powerful" than asp is utterly laughable. "suffering" from it's association with Microsoft is much more desirable in my mind than suffering from no association what-so-ever, except that of 10,000 pony-tailed computer geeks who would rather spend days configuring such esoteric web-server settings as server-side cache timeouts; typing away bash scripts to configure host headers and security settings than simply pointing, clicking and getting on with our lives.





open source is highly (and by highly, i mean why in the world would you risk an enterprise level application on free, who the hell knows who wrote it and where you might get support for it, software) over-rated. i can write (if i wanted to grow my hair out and help to further the depletion of the worlds rubber supply on rubber bands for my newly acquired pony-tail,) asp.net and even jsp applications using notepad, or any other text editor of your choosing, and give it all away for FREE! does that make asp open source now? giving away ones hard work just to make a statement and "show" Microsoft is not noble, it's just plain stupid.





even i will admit that FireFox (open source and free) is a substantially better product than IE, but it will be forever relegated to a minor chunk of market share until the open source community starts charging for their work. sorry, but the bulk of modern society still believes that "you get what you pay for," and there is no overcoming that.
Reply:The language you choose is up to you.





Bear this in mind:





php is open source, and has a huge number of scripts and so on available free, because geeks worldwide are always writing new thingummies and offering them (some are better than others). It works very well with MySQL, which is also open source, and both products are almost always included in a hosting package without cost. I use it myself. If you have a problem, there's almost always someone online who has already worked out a solution, which you can find by searching on google. It's quite similar to c, i believe, but you don't declare variables, although you can cast them.





asp is microsoft's as you say. It is not as powerful as php, and it suffers from its association with ms. There are still scripts out there for free, though. "Regrettably, it is only properly supported on Microsoft's IIS platform thus ruling it out of contention for serious commercial users who care about security and reliability" according to http://training.gbdirect.co.uk/courses/p...





That article is pretty good, and may answer your question, in fact.





Java and JSP don't have such a high level of support online as php.





My rather biased opinion is that php is the way to go, maybe with some Flash if you want those really quite annoying menu icons you pointed out!





To answer your numbered questions





1. Changing pics dynamically, changing anything dynamically, is perfectly possible in php. In some cases you might need to use a little javascript as well.


2. Well, google will supply a search this site box, and their algorithm is pretty good, i would say.


3. You just setup the buttons in inc files named according to the page and dynamically included by the pagename


4. Lots of php proprietary products for these


5. To what? tell-a-friend is easy, just a form, really.


6. You can use flash with php


7. This is down to you!





The main reason for preferring open source over Microsoft or other closed source languages is that bugs in the actual language are much more quickly sorted out. A real life example of the problems that can be encountered is recounted in the article referred to above.





You have the choice to be blinkered and go for something that costs money, because it "must" be better, or to go for the industry standard, even if it IS free. The user of your site won't give a monkey's what you use, anyway.
Reply:If you do not know any of the web application development languages (jsp, php, asp) I suggest you try and go for a readymade solution like a content management system:


1) Drupal (highly recommended)


2) Joomla


3) PHPNuke


4) Postnuke





Using a CMS will save you a lot of time and effort
Reply:To change things dynamically, you'll need to be using javascript or another client side language. The only thing on your list that will rely on jsp/asp/php would be the search, forums, and the add/invite friends. Any of those can handle all three of those equally well. It's all a matter of preference. This might sound like a bad answer, but anybody who suggests one over the other is just saying what they like. Check out w3schools.com. They have good quick tutorials on all of them. Look at a few of each and pick which one you feel most comfortable with.
Reply:premade php applications like the one listed above would work just fine for your need.





generally, as long as its not a mega site, tons of traffic, tons of data, PHP seems to do the trick and very economical..

anemone