I don't like ASP. I don't like ColdFusion. I do like ASP.NET, and I'm beginning to like PHP. I think it's well thought out, well structured, and I think it's really fast.

Any other opinions?

I love ColdFusion, it's my preferred language. I work with .NET at my full time job where we are using it on our Intranet. For the most part, I could build most of my applications in half the time with ColdFusion compared to .NET. However, .NET has some good features that can't be overlooked. There were major improvements in speed with ColdFusion 6.1. It's much faster than the previous versions. .NET is generally fast, but you have to rebuild your application when you make any changes to the VB.NET code (With Visual Studio.NET) and the first time you re-run the application it's a little slow.

I don't even bother with ASP unless I absolutely have too.

PHP is great because of all the Open Source out there and it's speed. However, I still prefer ColdFusion, but that's just my opinion. To me, ColdFusion is much more simplifed. But then again, I'm not that smart, so that's probably why it comes so easy to me.

My 2 cents.

MB

I have to say that a lot of my fondness for technologies like ColdFusion and .NET is due to their smooth interaction with MS SQL Server. PHP is a great language, and it is wonderful for lightweight web apps with a MySQL back end. However, for mid-range and high end web applications, there isn't a better database server than MS SQL in terms of price/performance. PHP on Linux with freetds to connect to MS SQL Server is shaky in terms of performance, and PHP on Windows is not nearly as robust or secure. Oracle is always a consideration for your PHP apps, but that's quite pricey. Bottom line for me? ColdFusion is easy to use and an ideal fit for an MS SQL back end.

But hey...we support PHP on our SmarterLinux offering for a good reason. It's the platform of choice for a lot of developers and there are many VERY solid PHP applications out there (like the message board software we are using).

-Lou

I've personally always perfered PHP myself. It's a fairly simple language to learn, particullarly if you have a background in C and C++ and being open source and having such a greate development base is wonderful. That's another advantage to Perl as well and the other languages based off of C.

ASP and .NET are both languages I have not explored much, nor ColdFusion, but the bits of it I have dabbled with have not excited me as PHP and Perl does.

I have to admit, for web applications, perl and PHP are my favorite languages to use. Not only are they incredibly easy to learn, they are also very powerful. I wouldn't be able to accomplish half of the text manipulations I need to do without these languages

Perl is just gibberish as far as I can tell, but I agree with Dan - if you know C/C++, PHP is a cinch to read and pick up. It's a very clean, usable language