I’ve ran into an interesting problem lately, I’ve been enjoying building more and more applications on a LAMP platform in PHP, vs C#.net on IIS. My roots are really in PHP anyway, but school taught nothing but C#.. Quandry!  Since we don’t have time to argue this out in a blog post, I’ll just leave it here: I’m leaving C# on the desktop and utilizing PHP for it’s fast deployment ease of troubleshooting and flexible coding. During my move to more PHP applications I’ve an into an issue recently where an entire web project I’m trying to integrate with was written in asp.net using MSSQL. I just need to run a few stored proc’s for some data out of the MSSQL db, but unlike my IIS server or old, the Media Temple grid doesn’t have any MSSQL support in it’s versions of PHP. So, where does a guy go from there? To the universal language of data: XML.

It was so satisfying to remember that I could whip up an ASP page that asks for hugely long security keys to verify the host asking for data and then upon successful reading of keys hands the PHP script back all the data it needs, in an easy to spit-out much enjoyed XML document.

This brings me to a neat point here: if you’re writing a huge database driven web application and you’re likely to expand it’s functionality or allow others to design functionality based on your data… USE XML for getting data to process and vice versa when it’s done processing. This will leave your co-horts happily programming in the language of their choice, a nice place to be!