Something PHP cannot do that ASP.net can?

[cancer10]

Hi

The other day I was having a debate with one of my friend on the topic "ASP.net v/s PHP".

He said that ASP.net can interact with the OS and the hardware but PHP cannot. Is this true? Is this PHP's limitation that it cannot interact with the OS or the hardware??

Please if anyone can throw some light on this?


Many Thanks


*PS: Here were are referring Windows as the OS.

[djr33]

PHP certainly can interact with the OS. It may have a little easier time working with linux (especially since linux is very command line friendly), but it integrates with windows also.
exec() is the main function you would use to do this.
More info here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.exec.php

ASP may be designed specifically to interact with the OS because it and the OS are both made by Microsoft, BUT this means it will only work with Windows. PHP can interact with Windows, Linux, and (I believe) Mac, etc.


Now if you are talking about the USER's OS, then that is not possible with PHP. I don't know much about ASP, so maybe there is some extension to work through to the user (activex in IE?), but this won't be reliable because it will still be windows-specific, and I'm not sure it even exists.


There may be some different ways do interact with the server that vary by language, but both are capable of doing a lot, and PHP is more powerful because it works for any OS.