A Difficult Decision
I’ve finally decided which university to go to. The main choice came down to whether or not it was worth it to go to a course which teachs ASP .NET and Java as Internet languages.
Originally I thought not, since my entire web design base stems from PHP and CSS based learnings so I had my blinkers on at the Open Day when they started talking about the use of Java on the Internet for shopping carts (?). I did a bit of research, specifially on forums and reading articles such as ‘ASP .NET vs PHP’ and I gathered that, rather unsurpurisngly, I should learn both. One thing that sealed it for me was when I was glancing through ‘Ajax in Action‘: most of the server-side code in it was either Java or VB .NET. This is one the most celebrated AJAX books available, so that must have meant something.
So I’ve decided to go to the University of Kent, who funnily enough have just redesigned their site in CSS (NICE!). This is quite a nice turn of events to be honest, since everything else at that Uni is far superior to the other (Brunel in case anyone was wondering): Anime Club, a rugby side I could get into, lovely grounds, beautiful city nearby, the list goes on.
However! This means that I’m going to learn PHP in my spare time in my Gap Year now, as well as the fabled Ruby on Rails, which looks more and more exciting every time I read about it. Anyway, enough rambling: I’ve got an ICT Project to finish and a Mother’s Day card to write!
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I spent a reasonable amount of time (at work) using ASP .NET, and I wasn’t too fond of it. One thing I can’t stand, is the weight of Visual Studio — it’s completely congested and leaves you little room to work (you have to put both menu’s on auto hide, or you won’t survive). I found that the environment made it difficult to do exactly what I wanted at times. For instance, in PHP and Rails, a simple loop to display information is very straightforward, and you have total control over the markup. In .NET, it’s a little more complex than it has to be, because .NET likes to throw in some unique IDs (which is another pain to keep track of when you need to do AJAXy deleting), and the CSS is hard to style because of the data grids. I know there are ways around it, but filling an array with some data, then looping through it isn’t how .NET likes to do things. Working in the HTML becomes very messy, very quickly, which I despise.
In the end, I don’t have much experience with .NET to fully details it’s pros and cons. It’s going to be a personal choice obviously, but I’ve found that I’m more drawn to simplicity these days.
That’s fair enough, but plenty of sites which are a few years old are written in ASP, so a knowledge of it would be useful for maintenance, and it introduces a different style of programming, even if PHP and Rails are simpler. The .NET framework is currently in used, and might possibly be moreso in the future, within large businesses due to the vast variety of applications that can be linked together through it.
If luck is on our side though, PHP and Rails will become more prominent, especially according to what you are saying about displaying information.
But I want to learn it anyway, since it’s something I won’t cruise through, which I would with a PHP course since by that point I’ll know it pretty well.
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