Recommendations for web dev

[CaptainPoopface]

I have been working in .NET at my job for about a year now, and I've been studying JQuery and PHP in my rare scraps of spare time. I'm really impressed with JQuery and how powerful it has become. The web is the common ground for computers, tablets and phones, so I would like to get more heavily into web development, for personal and enterprise purposes. I have recently discovered MVC/Razor. Should I give up on PHP for the server side and go with Razor (or even Node.js)? Do you need to pay for a license to run a ASP.Net server? PHP is popular in small businesses because it costs nothing and can be run on license-free Linux-Apache, but ASP.Net has the huge resources of the .Net CLR beneath it.

I'm a little torn because I've invested some time in PHP, and a friend is already paying for a Linux server that I have free use of. On the other hand, Razor code looks really clean compared to PHP, and I'm already somewhat familiar with the .Net world.

Does anyone have recommendations or opinions one way or the other?

[OwnZ joO]

I would not go with PHP, it's a POS as far as programming languages go.

Node.js/Ruby on Rails/Python would probably be good choices as far as Linux servers go. That said, if you must use PHP I saw a framework called [img=http://laravel.com/]Laravel[/img] that made PHP look like it smells better. I prefer Node.js and Python in there, but Ruby on Rails is not too bad and a lot of beginning programmers seem to do well with it.

ASP.Net MVC4 is a very pleasant and feature rich framework for web apps. I don't really know much about licensing on it, but if you're running Windows Server edition to host it you would pay like 800 for that license I think. You probably could get by for a while without server edition if it's a small traffic website. Also you could use the mono framework on Linux, but there is some cloudy water there with patent concerns, and I don't know if MVC4 framework is available in mono.

[JacksonCougar]

I too would recommend avoiding PHP; I liked working with ruby, but getting everything setup and working can be a tiny bit more intensive.

Only done a tiny-bit of work with JQuery but it works.

[OwnZ joO]

jQuery is a client side(run in the browser) scripting language, you can use it to make your web page do dynamic things like make a call to your server to fetch items for a dropdown and update the page with those items or even sort a table(those are just examples, it can do lots of stuff) jQuery can be used with .Net, PHP, or really any server side technology.

Ruby is typically used on the server side and Ruby on Rails is a popular MVC web framework. It looks like Cougar is right and RoR install is more than a trivial sudo apt-get install, but there is a TurnKey Linux appliance that comes with it preconfigured.