VB.NET

The Microsoft .NET Framework is a software framework that can be installed on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems. It includes a large library of coded solutions to common programming problems and a virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework. The .NET Framework is a Microsoft offering and is intended to be used by most new applications created for the Windows platform. The framework’s Base Class Library provides a large range of features including user interface, data and data access, database connectivity, cryptography, web application development, numeric algorithms, and network communications. The class library is used by programmers, who combine it with their own code to produce applications. Programs written for the .NET Framework execute in a software environment that manages the program’s runtime requirements. Also part of the .NET Framework, this runtime environment is known as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The latest version (3.5) contains many new features building incrementally upon .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0, and includes .NET Framework 2.0 service pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.0 service pack 1.

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is the next generation ASP, but it’s not an upgraded version of ASP. ASP.NET is an entirely new technology for server-side scripting. ASP.NET is a part of the Microsoft .NET framework, and a powerful tool for creating dynamic and interactive web pages. C# is a type-safe, object-oriented language that is simple yet powerful, allowing programmers to build a breadth of applications. Combined with the .NET Framework, Visual C# 2008 enables the creation of Windows applications, Web services, database tools, components, controls, and more.

PHP

PHP is an excellent alternative to such similar programming solutions as Microsoft’s proprietary scripting engine ASP and Allaire’s rather expensive ColdFusion. As mentioned before, PHP is a cross-platform language. This doesn’t stop with the core PHP code but can be extended to all of PHP’s libraries and all code written in PHP. Neither ASP nor ColdFusion can make this claim. PHP has a large feature set which includes built-in support for numerous databases (including Access, LDAP, Oracle, and MSSQL), networking support, zip archiving ,and an excellent set of built-in functions. Furthermore, due in part to it being open source and freely available for download on the web, the language enjoys an active developing environment. Since the syntax structure borrows heavily from C, it is easy for even the novice programmer to learn the language. PHP is also the oldest HTML-embeded scripting language, giving it a head start on all the others.

JSP

JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a server side Java technology that allows software developers to create dynamically generated web pages, with HTML, XML, or other document types, in response to a Web client request to a Java Web Application container (server). Architecturally, JSP may be viewed as a high-level abstraction of Java servlets. JSP pages are loaded in the server and operated from a structured special installed Java server packet called a J2EE Web Application often packaged as a .war or .ear file archive. The technology allows Java code and certain pre-defined actions to be embedded into static page content and compiled on the server at runtime of each page request. Both the Java Server (J2EE specification) and the page scripts and/or extended customised programming added operate by (in the runtime context of being loaded programs used) a special pre-installed base program called a virtual machine (VM) that integrates with the host operating system, this type being the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).