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A Comparative Study between Dynamic Web Scripting Languages

Chapter · January 2012

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-27872-3_43

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 A Comparative Study between Dynamic Web Scripting
Languages

Alok Ranjan1, Rajeev Kumar1, and Joydip Dhar2

1
Department of Information Technology
2
Department of Applied Sciences
ABV - Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior, India
{iiitm.alok,rajeevkumariiitm}@gmail.com,
[email protected]

Abstract. Nowadays websites generate dynamic responses to the user requests.

This leads them to dynamic web scripting languages. PHP, JSP and ASP.NET
are the three most popular web scripting languages in the world. PHP is partic-
ularly useful for lightweight web applications. JSP which employs Java in its
implementation is useful for the systems which require extra security. ASP.NET
which is a Microsoft product combines some of the fine features of both PHP and
JSP. All the three languages have pros and cons associated with them. In this
paper, we have compared the impacts of these three languages on the perfor-
mance of a web server. We have described and analyzed the results of conducting
experiments on four benchmarks: calculating the factorial of 100, determining
whether a random word having 1 million characters is a palindrome or not,
sorting a list of 1 million random integers using merge sort, running Dijkstra’s
algorithm on a graph with 1000 nodes and 5000 edges. We employed famous
web servers viz. Apache 2.2.6, Apache Tomcat 6.0.26 and IIS 7.5. We have
shown the results using both built-in modules and self-written codes. Moreover,
we have used C# with ASP.NET which being an object oriented language pro-
vides built-in modules.

Keywords: ASP.NET, Dijkstra’s Algorithm, JSP, Merge Sort, PHP.

1 Introduction
HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language is a text and image formatting
markup language employed by web browsers to format web pages. It was first proposed
by Tim Berners-Lee [1, 16]. It has become exponentially more popular since then,
expanding beyond a small group of computer-science visionaries to the personal and
business sectors. Today, it’s almost a household word. As the utilization of World Wide
Web intensified, static HTML web pages were rendered inadequate considering the
growing requirements of mankind [2]. Earlier, web servers used to employ the basic
HTTP protocol. Once they received a client request, they would reply with a static
document containing only HTML content. However, gradually massive content began
to be required which had to be saved on the web server. This led in the consumption of
heavy storage area at the server side for big applications thus culminating into the waste

R. Kannan and F. Andres (Eds.): ICDEM 2010, LNCS 6411, pp. 288–295, 2012.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
 A Comparative Study between Dynamic Web Scripting Languages 289

of resources at the server side [3]. As a remedial measure, dynamic web scripting
languages were introduced. A dynamic web scripting languages is a language which
reacts to a user’s action. They are used to embed interactivity to otherwise static Web
pages. They can also automatically fill up parts of Web-based forms, among other uses.
Science zine [4] described the capabilities of JavaScript, a popular Web scripting
language: "Without any network transmission, an HTML page with embedded Java-
Script can interpret the entered text and alert the user with a message dialog if the input
is invalid. Or you can use JavaScript to perform an action (such as play an audio file,
execute an Applet, or communicate with a plug-in) in response to the user opening or
exiting a page."
One of the first dynamic scripting languages was Common Gateway Interface
(CGI). Using CGI the web programmers were able to produce scripts which were able
to read input parameters and return an HTML page meeting specific user requirements)
[5]. Development of CGI led to the hunt for more sophisticated and robust web
scripting languages. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) followed the era of CGI. It is one of
the most heavily used dynamic web scripting languages in the world. It is widely used
to implement lightweight web applications and to access databases and other kinds of
middleware. It was originally developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 [6]. It is open
source software released under the PHP license. It can be easily embedded into an
HTML source document. Then after, it can be interpreted by a web server with a PHP
processor module generating the web document.
JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a technology which uses Java as supporting language. It
aims at allowing programmers to utilize the vast capability of Java in building their web
applications [9]. It by released by Sun Microsystem in 1999. It may be considered as a
high-level abstraction of Java servlets. JSP pages are loaded in the server and operated
from a Java server packet, often packaged as a .war or .ear file archive. It allows Java
code and certain pre-defined actions to be intermixed with static web markup content,
with the resulting page being compiled and executed on the server to deliver an HTML
or XML document. The compiled pages and any dependent Java libraries use Java
bytecode rather than a native software format, and must therefore be executed within a
Java virtual machine (JVM) that integrates with the host operating system to provide an
abstract platform-neutral environment.
ASP.NET is a web application framework designed by Microsoft to facilitate building
web sites, web applications and web services. It follows a code behind model i.e. it deals
with the dynamic program code by placing them in a separate file or in a separate tag [8].
Thus, it allows the designers and coders to work separately. It permits the programmers to
build applications using an event-driven GUI model, rather than in conventional
web-scripting environments like CGI, PHP, Python etc. The framework employs existing
utilities such as JavaScript with internal components like "ViewState" to bring persistent
state to the inherently stateless web environment. The ASP.NET in itself is not a pro-
gramming language. It is built on a Common Language Runtime(CLR) allowing the
programmers to choose any language form a wide pool of languages such as Python ,
VB.NET, C#.NET J#, Delphi.NET, Chrome etc to code the web application under
consideration. A complete list of languages allowed in ASP.NET is given on [10].
The table below depicts a brief comparison between PHP, ASP.NET and JSP based
on some general parameters.
290 A. Ranjan, R. Kumar, and J. Dhar

Table 1. A brief comparison between PHP, JSP and ASP.NET

Area PHP JSP ASP.NET

Licensing cost Free licensing Free licensing Costly Licensing
Platform(s) Multiple Multiple Windows only
External Hosting Widely available Not so available Widely available
with zero cost although free although requires fee
Security Very good Good Good
Scalability Scales very well Scales well when Can be difficult to
configured properly scale
Configuration Extremely flexible Moderately flexible Not very flexible
flexibility
Framework(s) Many available Standard framework Standard framework

The table given below depicts sample codes of PHP, JSP and ASP.NET outputting
Hello World!

Table 2. Examples of PHP, JSP and ASP.NET scripts with HTML

PHP Script JSP Script ASP.NET Script HTML result

<html><body> <html><body> <html><body> Hello World!
<?php <%="Hello World!" <%
echo “Hello %> Re-
World!”; </body> sponse.Write(“Hello
?></body> </html> World!”);
</html> %></body>
</html>

In this paper, we intend to study the impact of three different and famous web
scripting languages viz. PHP, JSP, ASP.NET on the performance of a web server.
Although a wide variety of languages can be used with ASP.NET, in our study, we have
used C# along with it. We conduct experiments on some standard benchmarks using
both built-in modules and self- written codes.

1.1 Client Server Architecture

Client–server model of computing is a sort of distributed application structure [7].It is

used by almost all the web scripting languages. The languages discussed in this paper
also use it. In this section we provide an overview of this architecture.
Client server architecture divides the workloads between different service stations
known as servers, and service requesters, called clients. Generally, servers and clients
communicate over a network; however, they may lie on the same system. Such systems
in which servers and clients lie on the same machine are called virtual machine. A
server machine is a host which is running one or more server programs sharing its
resources with clients. A client shares none of its resources. However it can always
request a server's content or service function. Clients, hence, initiate communications
with servers. Fig. 1 depicts the Client –Server architecture over the World Wide Web.
 A Comparative Study between Dynamic Web Scripting Languages 291

Fig. 1. Client Server Architecture

In our experiments, we have used the client- server architecture having both clients
and servers residing on the same system. These types of systems are advantageous for
debugging and testing purpose of web script language programming. While building
any application, a programmer can test on his own computer whether the application is
working as per his expectations or not. If not, he can change the application right on his
computer. These tasks can be performed without the overhead of uploading the codes
on any distant server time and again. Examples of such systems include LAMP,
WAMP, and SAMP etc.

Fig. 2. Client and Server on the Single PC

292 A. Ranjan, R. Kumar, and J. Dhar

2 Literature Survey
There has been a heavy research evaluating the performances of static and dynamic
web contents. In paper [11], a sophisticated study was performed about the effect of
dynamic contents on the performance of web servers. It was revealed that it is ex-
tremely slow to retrieve a web page when coupled with a dynamic scripting language,
in this case Common Gateway Interface (CGI), than when it is a plain static web page.
In paper [12], the authors concluded that the personalization of web pages comes at a
price. The processing required for dynamic web pages and the overhead arising out of the
database access often result in a negative impact on the performance of the web server.
The authors have quantified each of these effects. They determined that these effects as a
whole diminish up to a factor of 8 the highest request rate bolstered by any user. The
results obtained by them suggested that Java outperformed both PHP and Perl. They also
inferred that web server performances under overload can be quite unpredictable. They
also concluded that PHP, Perl and Jetty which are dynamic content generation technology
are quite robust while some other technologies such as Resin are not.
In paper [13], Ramana studied the performances of MySQL and PHP components in
the Linux environment using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) architecture.
They built a web application with the help of LAMP and measured the performance
with respect to the application. They quantified the improvement in performance that
would increase if one was coded in C as against PHP. They also did some application
level benchmarking comparative study on the performance of the application on Linux
and Windows environments. They concluded that Apache outperforms Windows with
IIS when the program was coded in PHP and the persistence was with MySQL. They
also showed that Windows armed with Apache, PHP and MySQL falls in between.
Cecchet et al., in paper [14], compared three middleware architectures for generating
dynamic web contents: PHP, Java servlets, and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). They
attached PHP to the Web server. They set the database interfaces in PHP to be adhoc
and wrote it separately for each and every database. They determined that Java servlets
execute independently rendering independence from any particular database. They
achieved so doing all database operations using JDBC. EJB employed a component
based approach which was platform-independent. It divided the business logic and the
presentation logic in different tiers. Also the code for auction site using Java servlets
was lengthier than that employing PHP implementation. The same holds for the online
bookstore. They concluded that Java tools and safety properties associated with it did
help in debugging, but it also required multiple re-casts posing many trade-offs be-
tween typed and untyped languages. Although EJB was determined to be quite easy to
use, as it did not require written SQL queries, the implementation done by the authors
required more lines of code in Java than in that required in servlets. It was due to the
fact that they required many interfaces which were required to be implemented to
structure the application logic into beans. PHP scripts were determined to be more
efficient than Java servlets in terms of performance. However, PHP scripts were tied to
the Web server and provided limited functionality and runtime support whereas Java
servlets execute in a different process from the Web server. The authors used it to
achieve better performance when web server is proved to be the bottleneck. The
authors determined that servlets can be used to improve performance if there is data-
base lock contention application. They also concluded that EJB offers the most flexible
 A Comparaative Study between Dynamic Web Scripting Languages 293

architecture. EJB offers maany software engineering qualities such as modularity, ppor-
tability, and maintainability
y. However it was determined that the EJB is less efficiient
than the Java servlets and PHP.
P
In paper [15], the authorrs presented three benchmarks for dynamic web sites w with
differing characteristics: an
n online bookstore, an auction site, and a bulletin boaard.
They carried out bottleneck k characterization of the benchmarks.

3 Experiments and
d Analysis
In order to compare the perfformances between PHP, JSP and ASP.NET, we have uused
the following versions of thhe languages under consideration. These are the latest vver-
sions of the above three lan
nguages.
• PHP 5.3.2
• JSP 2.1
• ASP.NET 4.0 (Miccrosoft .NET framework)
In order to carry out the ex
xperiments, we have used a machine possessing 1 GB m main
memory and a 1.83 GHz du ual core processor with windows XP service pack 2 as the
operating system. We used Apache
A 2.2.6, Apache Tomcat 6.0.26 and IIS 7.5 as the w
web
servers.
We compared the three languages
l on the basis of the following four benchmarkss,
• Finding the factoriial of 100 (factorial benchmark).
• Determining wheth her a random word having 1 million characters is a paalin-
drome or not (palinndrome benchmark).
• Sorting a list of 1 million random integers using merge sort [17] (merge sort
benchmark).
• Running Dijkstra’ss algorithm on a graph with 1000 nodes and 5000 edges [[18]
(Dijkstra benchmaark).

250

200

150 PHP 5.3.2

JSP 2.1
100
ASP.NET 4..0
50

0
Factorial palindro
ome Merge Sort Dijkstra

Fig. 3. Execution time using self- written codes

294 A. Ranjan, R. Kumarr, and J. Dhar

300
250
200 PHP 5.3.2
150 JSP 2.1
100
ASP.NET 4.0
50
0
Factorial palindrome Merge Sort Dijkstra

Fig. 4.
4 Execution time using built-in modules

We conducted experiments on the above four benchmarks using the three languaages
under consideration. We useed both self-written codes and built-in modules of the abbove
four benchmarks in all the three languages. In ASP.NET we actually used C# siince
ASP.NET in itself is not a language
l rather it is a framework. We conducted 1000 ttests
on each benchmark with eacch language and calculated the total runtime of the executiion.
xecution time of the three languages over 1000 tests on the
Fig.3 depicts the total ex
four benchmarks using selff-written codes. Similarly Fig. 4 depicts the total executtion
time of the three languagees over 1000 tests on the four benchmarks using buillt-in
modules.

4 Conclusions and Future Work

We carried out sophisticateed experiments to ascertain the performances of three w web
scripting languages viz. PH
HP, JSP and ASP.NET. We have shown the results in Figg. 3
and Fig. 4. Fig. 3 depicts th
he experimental results for the self-written codes while the
Fig. 4 depicts the experimental results for built-in modules. It can be easily concluuded
from the graphs that no lan nguage excels under all circumstances. If we consider nu-
merical calculation, we can conclude that PHP works the best out of the three languaages
under consideration as sho own by the actions of the three languages on factoorial
benchmark. It holds for bothh self-written codes and built-in modules. On the contraryy, if
we consider comparison baased problems such merge sort, JSP comes out to the cllear
winner out of the three langguages for both self- written and built-in modules. One can
infer, in case of complex problems
p such as Dijkstra’s algorithm and problems pper-
taining to string manipulatiions such as palindrome checking that ASP.NET perforrms
stupendously.
In our experiments, we have
h used C# as the supporting language in ASP.NET ..We
know that we have a very laarge pool of languages available to be used as the supportting
language with ASP.NET [1 10]. In future, experiments can be aimed at using differrent
languages with ASP.NET.
 A Comparative Study between Dynamic Web Scripting Languages 295

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