ASP.NET v.s. PHP for NAV e-commerce

gadzilla1

Hello all,

I was recently tasked to give pros and cons of .NET and PHP as the development tool for NAV e-commerce.

I'm a .NET guy, but wanted to give an objective look at the two languages.

Please give your opinions and thoughts...it would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

gadzilla1

Someone? Anyone? Surely there are some opinions that can be shared....any feedback is much appreciated.

garak

We use PHP 5 to solve our exigencies. Third party tool we write in C# (in past C++).

Which language you use (PHP, ASP, Phyton or else) is dependent on your needs. But the business logic is in C/AL.

Regards

girish.joshi

I don't have a tremendous amount of experience with PHP, but frankly, I don't think it makes much difference at all.

From NAV's perspective, all of the b-logic should be in NAV, and therefore accessed through webservices. As far as I know, there is no significant difference in the way any object oriented language handles web services.

From a rendering perspective, I know that ASP.NET used to a be a little clunky (circa 2002), and therefore PHP was preferential.

I suppose that there are differences between which you should prefer, but I don't think the differences have anything to do with NAV.

DenSter

girish.joshi wrote:

From NAV's perspective, all of the b-logic should be in NAV, and therefore accessed through webservices

I don't follow that logic. All business logic should be contained within a NAV process. Whether you have this running as a message queue monitor, or a TCP/IP socket, or an internal timer that polls something, it doesn't have to be a webservice.

This NAV process will be programmed in C/AL, not .NET or PHP. The external app, or web page will need to be programmed in a language that has the mechanism to communicate through the same means as the NAV component is using, and as long as that language has those capabilities, it doesn't matter which language that is. You could even write your own language.

girish.joshi

I think we're saying the same thing, Denster.

My emphasis was on webservices because it is becoming (has become?) the best practice for ecommerce.

But you're right, the logic is programmed in C/AL, the communication component can be any number of things, and the external language can be anything that interfaces with the communication component.

gadzilla1

This reply is for Denster.

Hi Denster,

I was wondering about your comment:

"This NAV process will be programmed in C/AL, not .NET or PHP. The external app, or web page will need to be programmed in a language that has the mechanism to communicate through the same means as the NAV component is using..."

I follow that logic loud and clear. Do you know of any push to move more C/AL development towards .NET with future versions of NAV? I'm thinking long term.

Any input is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

gad1

DenSter

Hi Gad1 (I wish you'd use your real name),

You should follow the official releases from Microsoft about this. There's nothing that I can add to that, as it would all be speculating.

gadzilla1

Hi Daniel,

My name is Chris, it's a pleasure meeting you. Thanks for your replies.

DenSter

You're welcome Chris I know my comments are not very helpful. I signed an NDA with Microsoft so I can't really talk about this. The only thing I can say is that in NAV 2009 there will be no C/AL development in any .NET environment, and as far as Microsoft has published there are no plans to make that happen in future versions either.