More questions on web processing scripts

Why are some processing scripts written in php as opposed to say asp, or visa versa; or even in cgi? Does it matter which one you use.
Also, does the hosting server/service need to run a cgi-interface for php or asp scripts to work, as is the case for cgi scripts?

 

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but I'll give you an analogy.

If you want to get to work, what do you use? A car? A bus? A tricycle? Doesn't matter if you get there They're all different technologies, they just work in a different way and have different requirements and limitations - but they all do the same thing. They let you do stuff on the server.

In order to use ASP you need to have IIS, which runs on Windows Server (actually there is a version on XP, but it's limited to one website). You can't run ASP on any other platform (not particularly well anyway). When hosting you'll see "ASP Hosting" or "Windows Hosting" or something like that, indicating you can run ASP.

PHP works on most web servers, Apache, IIS, anything else you can think of you can probably compile PHP to run with it. You need to have the module installed on your web server. Other than that there are no specific requirements.

CGI isn't really a language. CGI is just a method of running other scripting languages. For example you can have PHP run through CGI - it's not recomended though since it's got some serious bottleneck issues. You can run Perl, Python, whatever through CGI. That's what makes CGI powerful - the flexibility of it. All you need is a CGI executable which can run the scripts installed on the server and set up with your webserver to handle certain kinds of files (like a .cgi or .php file).

Hosting for PHP is fairly ubiquitous, since it runs under Linux very well and Linux webservers are very cheap to buy and run for the hosting company. People tend not to allow CGI any more since there are faster ways to do things, and there are certain security issues with CGI.

 

Many thanks. So I should go with PHP scripts as it seems the most flexible (?). The machine that I will eventually FTP from is Win-XP, so I'm assuming that the server must also be Windows...

 

FTP is server agnostic. FTP is a protocol. You can FTP files from a windows box to a Unix/linux/other box without any problems.

 

Right - so FTP software are compatible between different operating platforms. Didn't know this. Many thanks

 

let me make the distinction between FTP server FTP client and compatibility.
The FTP client is the software you use to connect to an FTP server. The FTP client "talks" to the FTP server using the FTP protocol. The FTP CLIENT software is HIGHLY dependent on the operating system in which it is installed. The FTP SERVER is also HIGHLY dependent on the operating system it is installed on. The reason for this is simple. The operating systems are not the same; if we're talking Windows to Linux then you can't install an .EXE on linux.. it just won't work. So The client and server SOFTWARE are OS dependent. The COMMUNICATION protocol that is used to talk to the FTP SERVER is agnostic because the FTP protocol is a standard. So any CLIENT FTP software can talk to any FTP SERVER to transfer files regardless of OS.

 

Thanks for clearing that up - I understand now...