Hey guys, i am using dreamweaver to create a web site for the company i work for.

I have been saving the files as a regular .htm file. but i see that i can save the files in PHP ASP and a few other format's

Can anyone please explain to me what exactly does these 2 file formats do are perhaps why should i use these formats...

Thanks Guys for all the help...

PHP & ASP are both server side scripting solutions.

Quite honestly if you don't know what they are you don't need them yet.

I'd say if you don't know what they are you should consider learning more about them. PHP is excellent for making dynamic sites, and also to talk to databases. Dreamweaver is a great tool for writing dynamic pages that talk to databases. There is a good beginner's book called "PHP Dreamweaver MX 2004" (there should be one for your version of DW as well) which I can recommend, it gives you a practical intro to PHP and MySQL.

PHP stands for hyperlink preprocessor which is open source scripting language for web development and that is used for Linux servers.
ASP stands an active server page which is also scripting language and it is only used for windows servers. Dreamweaver is great tool for web development. You should go through this tutorials, it will help you hopefully.
w3schools.com

Bear in mind that while dreamweaver can give you a page preview of the HTML as you type it, it won't do so well with serverside code, since the code actually needs to run, and might have different outcomes depending on time of day or database contents. Still, Dreamweaver does have facilities for writing code in these languages. HTML is a markup language and describes the page content, while PHP and ASP are full programming languages, mainly used to generate HTML.

You can run PHP on windows servers, and there are varieties of ASP that run under UNIX too.

Originally Posted by 0beron

Bear in mind that while dreamweaver can give you a page preview of the HTML as you type it, it won't do so well with serverside code, since the code actually needs to run

This is easily solved by installing an Apache server on your local machine. It's actually quite easy. Dreamweaver is able to tell the difference between a local and a remote version of your site.

Hey guys, following up on Danny. Guillory's question.
ASP is for Linux servers & PHP is for Windows servers.
So is it safe to say that if I'm uploading my site to a host using either ASP or PHP then I should know what type of servers my host has?
Jolly Rodger

Nope

ASP is for Linux servers & PHP is for Windows servers.

In general, it's the other way around.
As Oberon posted (post #5)

You can run PHP on windows servers, and there are varieties of ASP that run under UNIX too.

So is it safe to say that if I'm uploading my site to a host using either ASP or PHP then I should know what type of servers my host has?

That's an extremely safe statement.

Originally Posted by Jolly_Rodger

So is it safe to say that if I'm uploading my site to a host using either ASP or PHP then I should know what type of servers my host has?

Also note that some Windows hosts offer both ASP and PHP, whereas most linux hosts only offer php. Although I would recommend a linux host if you're going to use php as linux is php's native environment. This is especially true if you run php web applications like vBulletin - they work on windows but they work even better on linux.

Just my 2c.

Another option is ASP.NET, it's like the next version of ASP. I'd say there's no point in learning or starting any projects in standard ASP because it's becoming a bit obsolete. ASP.NET is far more up to date, more structured and logical, and is a compiled language (unlike ASP and PHP which are scripting languages, they have to be interpreted on the fly, which makes them generally slower).

I've recently been working in ASP.NET Version 2 (with Visual Studio 2005). It's incredibly easy and usefull (you can create a table filled with the formatted contents of a database table, complete with sorting and paging, without having to write any code).

Another great feature that I have to get off my chest is master pages. You can design a single page with a title, navigation and other common features, define content placeholders, then create child pages off it. The child pages simply expose the content areas and nothing else, so you could put the content for each page in them. When you change the master page, it reflects onto all the child pages. So you get almost no repeated content between your pages.

For more info see www.asp.net !

Originally Posted by Minaki

Another great feature that I have to get off my chest is master pages. You can design a single page with a title, navigation and other common features, define content placeholders, then create child pages off it.

That's cool, but it's also a standard feature in software like Dreamweaver and I'm sure others, too.

My only gripe with ASP.NET is that it seems to work very slow in Firefox and a lot of features seem to require IE in PC. Is this correct or am I mistaken?

My only gripe with ASP.NET is that it seems to work very slow in Firefox and a lot of features seem to require IE in PC. Is this correct or am I mistaken?

It's a M$ offering, would you expect anything different?