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Table of Contents
Web development technologies and application programming languages are omnipresent today. Modern technologies like Node.js come with various frameworks, and on the other hand traditional technologies like ASP.NET and PHP are also being used with modern frameworks to help meet increasing requirements. We will look into three server-side frameworks, viz. ASP.NET MVC, Symfony for PHP, and Node.js Express.
Let us compare them in terms of development, performance, and other various aspects. All these languages possess their own set of skills and features and there is no size fits all server side language or framework. In some instances it was found that Symfony is the most friendly to new developers. Another instance suggested that ASP.NET MVC has the best performance in a Windows environment. In terms of security, support, and industry uses, Node.js Express has the most support. One a larger scale though, ASP.NET MVC framework is the most widely used for enterprise-level websites.
It is time to get down to the details.
ASP.NET MVC
One of the best frameworks that Microsoft revealed up from its sleeve was ASP.NET MVC. It carries the MVC or Model-View-Controller pattern, interestingly named Thing-Model-View-Editor. This was first introduced in the 1970s for graphical user interface and since then it has been extensively adopted for web development.
- Model: Portrays application data and behavior
- View: it is the HTML markup that display to the user
- Controller: responsible for managing relationships between the View and the Model.
Symfony
A great and fastidious high-performance PHP framework for web development, Symfony is an open-source project. It was released back in 2005. This latest version of Symfony uses the MVC pattern to build websites as well. It uses third party libraries to enhance its performance, like Doctrine for database management and Twig for front-end development.
Node.js Express
Without a doubt, JavaScript has been widely used in web development, especially in the front-end. Node.js Express was released as a server-side language in 2009 to provide an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model and also a lightweight and efficient framework. The framework has been primarily written in C, C++, and JavaScript.
Comparing the technologies
What should one opt for? Whether choose Node.js or Symfony development or go for ASP.NET MVC development services? Maybe it’s too early to ask. Choosing the most suitable technology for building a web application is always a challenging task for developers and entrepreneurs alike. One has to consider a multitude of aspects before selecting the technology and framework. They can either be cost, development cycle, employee skill level, performance, etc.
A. Working Environment
To start with ASP.NET MVC, the best working environment is in Windows and Visual Studio. As soon as you install Visual Studio 2013 or newer, you can easily start the development work. The web server used in ASP.NET MVC, Internet Information Services or IIS, has already been included in Visual Studio. This makes setting up the working environment for ASP.NET MVC a piece of cake.
Next is Symfony. Even though you can use it in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, the primary working environment for Symfony is LAMP which is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Hence, in order to set up the working environment of Symfony, you need to have Apache, MySQL, and PHP installed before installing Symfony. This requires for a developer to have some basic knowledge about Linux.
Node.js too is popular in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. One great feature of Node.js is that it is extremely lightweight due to npm, a package manager. This makes installing Node.js simple for both Windows and Linux, similarly to the installation of other regular software.
B. Database Connectivity
With ASP.NET MVC you get a framework to manage the database. By default it uses the Entity Framework. It is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework which manages the operations between the program and the database. Entity framework in the ASP.NET MVC supports database-first, model-first and code-first styles of development. You will see that the default database used in ASP.NET is SQL Server, however that is not all. It also supports other popular databases. Once the connection with the database is completed, the database-based model code gets generated automatically with a diagram on the screen.
For Symfony, connecting a database is smooth and frictionless. You need to set up the database variables first in the parameters.yml file, including database host, port, username, password, etc., and then you are done; the database is connected. Symfony framework makes use of a database framework, Doctrine, to manage the communication with the database. Doctrine is nothing but another ORM architecture framework. As a matter of fact, the query language used in Doctrine is Doctrine Query Language (DQL), similar to Hibernate Query Language (HQL), an object-oriented SQL language which operates on specific objects and their properties. It does not rely on tables and columns as in the original SQL language.
The process of connecting to a database in Node.js is the same as in Symfony. All you do is set the properties of a database in a file, such as IP, Username, Password, etc. This framework does not use a database framework, and therefore the query language in Node.js is the original SQL language operating directly on tables and columns
C. Support
In terms of support and documentation, you will find that all of the three technologies have large communities of developers to get support from. In a majority of situations, solutions can be found from these communities when encountering problems.
For Node.js, it is used by many third-party vendors and is one of the most popular languages according to GitHub. Developers in ASP.NET MVC, on the other hand, are usually dedicated development teams, the community support of Node.js is stronger than ASP.NET MVC. Lastly, since Symfony is not the most popular PHP framework among many others, the support from its communities is not as strong as the other two technologies.
Endnotes
All of these frameworks are fantastic at their dedicated places. All you need to have is a clear vision of what output you expect from your business. Asking the right set of questions can help you clear the fog and look at the right equation that can bring out the best in your business.
