How does it compare with ASP? Perl?

How does it compare with ASP? Perl?

[LIST][*] PHP has the same context as ASP - that is, it's embedded inside HTML. Perl on the other hand has a shell context - it was designed for use on the command line, not inside a web page.

[*] ASP's native implementation is Windows only, using the IIS server. Some UNIX implementations also exist, but their feature sets aren't as complete, and at the time of writing, none were free. Conversely, PHP is available for well over a dozen platforms and web servers; in fact, any server that can supports the CGI standard can run PHP, and several optimised server-specific PHP modules also exist and are supplied with the standard package.

[*] Both PHP and Perl are modular - functionality can be added and removed by including modules. In Perl, modules must be loaded by the script or specified on the command line, but in PHP modules can be either dynamically loaded (in the script) or specified in the PHP.ini file to load automatically when PHP starts up.

[*] In tests, PHP's performance came out marginally ahead of ASP, though to be honest, there's not much in it. Both are approximately 3-4 times faster than Cold Fusion, however.

[*] PHP, like Perl, is open source. You can download the code, compile it, modify it, basically do whatever you want.[/LIST]