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First answer is PHP. PHP is similar to ASP in terms of functionality, however ASP follows a mix of XML and Code Behind techniques.

Benefits of PHP: It is very customizable. Usually developers will follow a Model-View-Controller paradigm, which lends itself very well to the way PHP functions. PHP also allows better object oriented programming that ASP (although C# for ASP has OOP as well).

Cons of PHP: Everything needs to be written from scratch. One of the benefits of ASP is that it uses the .NET framework and gives you access to lots of server controls already pre-built. Other than that, PHP really has no cons.

ColdFusion – We cannot forget about ColdFusion, as much as we would like to call it a dead language, it is still thriving. I use CF at work and I really do not like it. It is a rapid development language that uses custom XML tags for programming logic, and has a lot of functionality out of the box. The downsides of CF outweigh the pros significantly. One is that CF does not really support object oriented design (coldfusion developers are divided on this subject and I am sure I could have a good debate with someone on this) and it is bulky, running on Java rather than C++ (PHP).

Now in recent years, the Ruby programming language has also been gaining popularity. Ruby on Rails is a framework that allows development of web applications using Ruby. Django is a Python framework for building web applications as well.