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Chili!Soft ASP Port to FreeBSD? 109

Posted by Nik from the NR:-Cryptonomicon dept.
An unnamed reader writes "Daily DaemonNews is running a story about Chili!Soft doing a port of Chili!Soft ASP to FreeBSD. It seems they're trying to gather enough interest to make a port worth while. A phone number and link is mentioned in the article."
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Chili!Soft ASP Port to FreeBSD? More

Chili!Soft ASP Port to FreeBSD?

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  • You should really go with JSP. Then you can develop on a free implementation and deploy on a supported commercial platform.

  • Re:Why people like ASP (Score:4)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alex@NoSpAm.spamcop.net> on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @03:28AM (#352393) Homepage
    • It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.
    However, as The Jargon File [tuxedo.org] points out, ASP just seems like a language with candygrammar [tuxedo.org]:
    • "[...] The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker."
    So, as noted there, easier syntax doesn't automagically make a language easier to use.

    Alex Bischoff
    ---
  • Posted by SchumacherWinsAgain:

    PHP = Schumacher
    ASP = Hakkinen

    Winner, Hero, Schumacher!
  • Posted by njspencer:

    Very simple.

    Want the power and scalability of Unix Platform, and don't want to totally rewrite you current software base.

    It is a very compeling business case. Also you have to go with what your developers know. Once again you could retrain, but that costs. The one time cost is far less than training.

    Yes, if you wish to write from ground zero you would use Perl/PHP or another language. But, the purpose is porting.
  • On the other hand a more complicated syntax doesn't make it any easier to program in either, as Perl has shown us.

    Yay Python. :-)

    -Dom
  • If you've got to use ASP, there are a number of solutions that already work on BSD!

    The most complete is a commercial package from Halcyon Software [halcyonsoft.com], called Instant ASP. There's a comparison between iASP and Chili!ASP [halcyonsoft.com] on the site (hard to find just with their links). Since iASP is Java (servlet) based, it also makes a decent package to support migration from ASP to JSP.

    There are also at least a couple free ASP tools that work fine on BSD: Apache::ASP [nodeworks.com] (Perl only), and ASP2PHP [naken.cc], which supports a certain amount of automatic conversion from ASP VBscript pages to PHP.

  • Err.. if I remember correctly, ChilliASP is implemented in Java, so you would have the overhead of the VMs. Or is that Halcyon InstantASP?

  • Sounds like a Slashdot story about some Linux application, three years ago. Quicken, anyone?
    --
    "In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."

  • Seeing as several of the large, full-service web hosting companies are doing more with the *BSDs, this makes enough sense. ASP support lets them reach a lot of would-be Windows hosting customers with a Unix-y solution that's easier and cheaper to offer than Win2K hosting. And it lets them offer customers something they can run UltraDev with without nearly as much system overhead as dozens of servlet/JSP engines on a virtual server box would need.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Maybe technically, but in reality most people mean the IIS/MS kind.

    What? That didn't even make any sense. Did you even bother cracking that book open past Chapter 1: A Dynamic Web Page Saying "Hello, World!"? Please, just stop now.


    Cheers,

  • The people who think that PHP is as powerful an environment as ASP (much less ASP.net) are the same people who can't figure out why people would use Oracle when MySQL is free.


    Cheers,

  • Your post made it abundantly clear that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. What's this ASP language that you're talking about? Perlscript? Python?

    Seriously, I'm just extremely curious why you'd even want to post on this subject when you don't understand it. Boredom? Masochism? The thrill of trolling?


    Cheers,

  • Expensive software (Score:3)

    by toofast ( 20646 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @02:24AM (#352405)
    Last time I checked, Chili's ASP for Linux was damn expensive. With all the *free* programming languages out there, why would anyone do ASP? Why not use PHP or Perl?
  • First there's the argument that PHP makes ASP unnecessary. While I agree in principle (and use PHP as my primary server side scripting solution), there's no question that ASP is here to stay because it is the cornerstone of the Microsoft Internet strategy. I would, therefore, urge people to consider that ASP for non-MS platforms is analagous to StarOffice being capable of using MS Office file formats: this is a great thing to help people migrate to *BSD if they want to, or to use *BSD as a backup to their Windows environment. For that reason alone, I'm very excited about this latest development. I don't expect there'll be any PHP people switching to ASP now 'though.

    My second (and larger) concern is with Chili!Soft. Specifically I worry about the exclamation mark between the 'Chili' and the 'Soft. What's it doing there? Is it lost? Someone may want to ask Chili!Soft why they don't see other companies with similar punctuational conventions. Where are the Slash?Dots, or the Mac@Words, or the Linux&Cares? Nowhere. Why? Because it's stupid and impossible to pronounce punctuation as a conjunction between two words. Are we to understand that the Chili is vigorous and exciting, the the soft is ah, just soft? Could be Chili!Hard, or Chili!Bowl, they don't care.

    Truth be told, I don't really care. I just think it's amazing the lengths people will go to generate a distinct brand (either that or the lengths they will go to avoid admitting to a typo).
    ----------------------------

  • I know I'm being judgemental, but if someone wants to ensure that I take no interest in their product, all they have to do is include exclamation points in the name.

  • This seems like an interesting story and all, but the editors aren't putting similar, good topics like the non-inclusion [slashdot.org] of SGI's Apache speed patches (due to the size of the patches and patent problems) on the front page. That one definitely could use a Slashdot mention to get the community together and work on overcoming the obstacles to getting them committed. Faster Apache is more important to me than ASP support in Unix.
  • Chances are the ISP, if smart, doesn't allow the customer to run all kinds of third-party COM components.
    If they want to run their own custom or third-party components, they had better have their own colo. Otherwise, you run into administration and possibly licensing nightmares...(say the customer purchases a component for one site only, they're vhosted on a server with 100 sites, and they want you to register this component...what's stopping another user from instantiating the component?)
  • Oh boy! Just what I've always wanted! A chance to increase the worlds dependence on M$ shit. At least make it ASP 3.x compatible. Personally, I'll use PHP all day long over that crap ASP. I don't care that I can use my scripting language of choice for ASP, it's still a proprietary piece of shit, created to run VBScript. Pure drivel.



    Dive Gear [divingdeals.com]

  • ASP (Score:1)

    by bendawg ( 72695 )
    The main reason we looked at using Chilisoft is because some of our non programming literate HTML guys used some tool that generated ASP code. This prepackaged tool generated a testing application, that the higher ups demanded, and did so with little to no coding. Believe me, it was not my decision to have them use this tool, and if it was my decision, we would have developed this in house, because these guys no NOTHING about creating a multi user web application. THEY WERE GOING TO USE MS ACCESS FILES AS THEIR DATABASE FOR A MULTI USER HIGH PROFILE WEB APPLICATION ---AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH--- But I'll get to the point.

    While Chilisoft ASP is rather expensive, it is still less expensive than a high end NT server. For a lot less money and pain, we can put Chilisoft on our Sun cluster which has plenty of power already, and continue using (IMHO) the much more stable Solaris platform. So far, on our development server, it has seemd to provide us with very nice speed, plus I was easily able to configure ODBC connections to Oracle, and force the HTML guys to stop using Acess. Plus, we've got this application running on Chilisoft on a loaded down development Solaris box (to test it out), and so far, we've seen amazing performance out of it. We're seeing performance that NT zealots around here are amazed by.
  • actually e-Week had a comparison of web scripting languages about 2 months back and their recommendations. PHP was the fastest, by about 5-7%, then was ASP, then cold fusion and then JSP. Their recommendation was to stay clear of PHP as it was too difficult to maintain and scale. Cold fusion was their choice for rapid development. JSP, even though the slowest, was their overall best recommendation because of the robust feature set and the hopefully bright future of Java
    I think....therefore I am
  • Nope it won't.

    MacOS X is not in any way binary compatible with FreeBSD. Why ? because it is not FreeBSD and it does not even run on intel processor (or FreeBSD does not run on PowerPC).

    Sorry about that but I think your comment is void.

  • Nope.

    SunOS 4.x and below is BSD. But Solaris aka SunOS 5.x is System V, not BSD.

    BTW all of this stuff is not about the technical difficulties of porting a UNIX software to another UNIX system, but on commercial availability of binary-only software with commercial support that come with. Even if the port is trivial, offering to sale such a version cost money. More than you think.

  • You know, I've wondered this myself. I went looking on Chilisoft's site and found: "VBScript and JavaScript scripting languages" quote. No mention of using Perl or another WSH language....
    ---
  • Actually, I just realized I probably should have put this in Vb syntax ASP (VBScript) ...
    ---
  • Ahh, only to be nailed by the thing that kills the greater than and less than signs... SIGH.
    ---

  • ASP != VBScript (Score:5)

    by Pfhreakaz0id ( 82141 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @04:20AM (#352418)
    just FYI, lots of people here are using ASP when they seem to mean VBScript. The Windows Scripting Host can use a whole lot of scripting languages. Lots of folks use Jscript or even Perl.
    ---
  • perhaps offtopic, but damn when are they gonna port bbedit to other platforms? i keep my mac around for that one app. its so damn sweet.
  • (Since your post is just a verbatim copy of one you've written elsewhere on this thread, I'll duplicate my reply...)

    But porting a customer's website to Chili!Soft isn't just a case of copying over the VBScript: chances are their site will be utilising third-party COM components which aren't available under Linux.

    (I don't mean that COM components in general aren't available, just that the particular COM components already in use by the customer probably aren't).

    -Andy

    --
  • Just saw your other reply.

    :-)
    --
  • But porting a customer's website to Chili!Soft isn't just a case of copying over the VBScript: chances are their site will be utilising third-party COM components which aren't available under Linux.

    (I don't mean that COM components in general aren't available, just that the particular COM components already in use by the customer probably aren't).

    -Andy
    --
  • It may "do COM", but my point is that you'll have to roll your own. You won't be able to use any of the (many, many) currently available COM components from the win32 world - which, I assert, are what make ASP tolerable in the first place.

    -Andy
    --

  • No point without COM (Score:5)

    by gimbo ( 91234 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @02:37AM (#352424) Homepage
    I've used Chili!Soft ASP on Linux and whilst it works, I'll be very happy not to ever use it again. Here's why.

    The reason ASP is a winner in the win32 world is the availability of third-party COM components to do all the heavy lifting. The ASP "developer" generally just writes VBScript to hook this stuff together. More advanced developers might write their own components, but the reason it's so popular is that you don't have to.

    This isn't the case under Linux, with Chili!Soft ASP... The third-party components aren't there (no binary compatability between platforms), so all your logic has to be done in your scripting language, eg VBScript - which soon ceases to be fun. You can write your own components but it's decidedly non-trivial, much more so than in the win32 world where the tools for doing so are well developed.

    I'll stick to Python I think. And especially Zope [zope.org].

    -Andy
    --
  • From what I've heard from people that work with both ASP and PHP as well as what I've read. ASP is way faster then PHP unless you use the Zend engine to speed PHP up. Also, if you're working with MS servers then ASP is the way to go, since the integration is better. ASP has it's place, not sure if it's on a Unix/BSD machine however.
    --
  • They re-wrote ADO, and some MTS stuff (i think). When doing ASP bassicly it's about 90% ADO, or custom objects, so thats what they focused on.

    VBScript is licensed from MS, COM stuff is from WINE i belive, or maybe that company that makes that win32 layer for *nix.

    -Jon

    Streamripper [sourceforge.net]

  • WSH (Score:1)

    by jon_c ( 100593 )
    Technicaly is called "Active Scripting", the main interface is IActiveScript, which provides a way to get to the main interface hiarchy. There's also a crap load of other interfaces's like IActiveScriptSite, IApplicationDebugger, ILikeLongInterfaceNames, etc...

    WSH is a "host" of Active Sctipting.. but anyway..

    -Jon

    Streamripper [sourceforge.net]

  • Well, ISP's which need to host peoples ASP pages and dont want to do it on NT would find this usefull. There are MANY people which would find this helpful, since telling a client to recode their "wonderful" ASP website to PHP or ASP/perl is NOT usually an option. I personally prefer PHP, but this isnt an ideal world.
  • Well, ISP's which need to host peoples ASP pages and dont want to do it on NT would find this usefull. There are MANY people which would find this helpful, since telling a client to recode their "wonderful" ASP website to PHP or ASP/perl is NOT usually an option. I personally prefer PHP, but this isnt an ideal world.

  • Re:PHP (Score:1)

    by UU7 ( 103653 )
    ahaha, and if your an ISP that wants to serve customer pages on FreeBSD? Do I tell the majority to recode their pages to PHP ?

  • Re:PHP (Score:1)

    by UU7 ( 103653 )
    ya, good point thing is, migrating 300 sites and trying to get people to pay is not easy. Some people are just stubborn and think ASP is the best thing ever. Customers also edit their webpages and I could imagine the # of calls because they cant figure out why their edited code isnt working. heh, in an idea world ppl would only use a nice open source scripting language. I cant say chili is all that great since it costs alot of $ and as someone pointed out wont work with 3rd party COM components. BUT, for any ASP page that dosnt use them it makes life alot easier

  • Re:PHP (Score:1)

    by UU7 ( 103653 )
    Well, any free solution would be preferable to the cost of chili :P I have not actually used either solution yet so cant really say which would work better. but based on chili's features, it would be nicer, since running asp2php on the fly could be potentially slower.
  • Yes, but its still less of a step. Alot of asp pages arent using third-party COM components. Though you are right. third-party COM components make life a pain for porting.
  • I've seen deparments and universities move to Chilisoft (and eat the cost). Why? Can somebody explain to me why you'd choose it over PHP/mod_perl or whatever? Does it have a kick-ass IDE? Just curious.
  • TCO is $0. Asp is not, Cfm is not, php is.

    Moron alert!

    Just because something has an initial purchase cost of $0.00 does not on any way, shape or form imply that the "Total Cost of Owneership" is zero.

    If you think that $0.00 purchase price means $0.00 TCO then I have some real estate that I'd like to sell you...

  • Wow.. we have a bright one here.. So your company can eat the cost of advanced server or whatever NT you use? Okay so you can afford a MS Server OS but cant afford a freeOS+ChilliSoft ASP? Brilliant... Jeremy

  • Porting from one Unix to another (or Linux) is hardly brain surgery. Assuming they've coded the thing in a reasonably sane manner it shouldn't be that much effort to port over.

    As to the justification for doing it I would have thought the large number of BSD servers would be good enough reason.

  • You're confusing ASP with VBScript. VBScript is fairly limited, but you don't have to write ASP pages in VBScript. I routinely use Perlscript.

    • For HTTP Get/Put/Post, use Perl's LWP. I use this for running external pages as "subroutines" as well as for parsing external search results for specific info.
    • For basic TCP/IP, use the appropriate Perl module. They're all in there...
    • For encryption, it's trivial to write most algorithms in Perl, and they're reasonably fast. I do RSA and Blowfish encryption as well as SHA-1 hashing in Perlscript ASP.
    • For file uploads, it's simple to extract posted file data using Perl (see any old CGI upload script) and save the data as a binary file using binmode on the open file.
    • For file I/O, simply use Perl's file handling.
    • For db connectivity, I always use ADODB since I write for IIS, but I'd bet you a donut you could use DBI in a Perlscipt ASP page.

    Basically, ASP is just a framework that provides session, request, and other objects to interact nicely with the server. Choose whatever language addresses your problem, and don't get hung up on VBScripts limitations.

  • I write a lot of ASP, and I rarely use COM to do my heavy lifting.

    One of the great things about ASP is that you can mix script languages. I use VBScript because it's dead-simple and quick to write. For "hard" problems, I switch to Perlscript. There's almost nothing you can't do in Perl, and I've found it fast enough in most cases. I use Perlscript ASP routines when I need to encrypt, hash, process binary files, etc.

    I do use COM components to handle zip functions, but I'll bet I could get around that if I had to. As long as the ChiliSoft engine lets you switch script languages, I'm not nearly as constrained as you seem to think.

  • is LSD or PCP involved?
    --

  • Given the reliability level of MS servers, and the overall lack of security, I'd rather shove my mundane tasks to them, not vice-versa.

  • I'd love to see a really good argument for using ASP. I have yet to see one except that one can keep using Windows boxes to do development. Of course, that's not really good logic.

    If Macromedia would start to support PHP in Dreamweaver Ultradev, I'm sure lots of design houses that are looking at dynamic programming would use PHP instead.

    (Of course, I'd like to see XHTML support as well!)

    At any rate, in my job as a project manager I have never approved an ASP solution, and I don't think I ever will.

  • ASP is fine on a microsoft platform but it's designed for a microsoft platform. As a full time ASP programmer, if my company decided to move to a unix platform I would go out and learn PHP. I have been playing with PHP since knowing both increases my marketablity. I think porting ASP to BSD might be chilis way of finding a niche market if microsoft does come through and put .net on linux.

  • You're right. Let's abandon the WINE project as well.

  • as pointed out above, this isn't an ideal world, and if you're an ISP who likes to use BSD, and have clients who (for whatever reason, including cluelessness) have ASP sites they want you to host, this would beat either installing a seperate box with a different platform, telling them to rewrite their entire site or shop elsewhere.
  • At least Office would have some takers. ASP seems to be almost ignored by the *NIX community for good reason.

    Keep PHP and better that, don't waste time on ASP

    DanH
    Cavalry Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
  • This was the first question that came to mind when I saw the article posted. What about the COM stuff? Anyway I went looking for it. According to the User's Guide whitepaper [chilisoft.com] section on Using Chill!Soft ASP, step 8 it does do COM, just not on Linux. I wonder if it accurately simulates the thread blocking problems you can get with MFC COM objects.

    I find it highly amusing that a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc" [chilisoft.com] should feel the need put out a clone of IIS. Are they trying to complete with MS on two fronts? Are they determined to kick the chair out from under Bill?

    It may be totally malicous on Sun's part, but it might give those dorks that bought into the IIS thing and are not prepared to rewrite an escape route. (But probably not a very satifactory one).

  • It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.

    Firms can hire vaguely technical people to write ASP that could never get their head round PERL or PHP.

    Disclaimer: I'm not judging ASP, I'm pointing out why some people use it.

  • However, I think that an ASP port for UNIX should be completely free, opensource and so on.

    So write it. This 'I think' stuff get none of us anywhere.

    ps: Huzzah for Zope! [zope.org] ;)

  • One good reason for using ASP(and one thing that separates ASP from PHP) is that you get to use ActiveX Data Objects(ADO). ADO is a layer built on top of ODBC that simplifies programming. It will work with any ODBC aware database such as Oracle or mySQL. In my opinion, this makes for a very clean way to do database programming.

    You can execute any SQL commands or stored procedures with ADO, in addition you get a Recordset model that lets you do things like test for the beginning or end of recordsets, use the MoveNext-MovePrevious-MoveLast methods, and lets you do paging easily. You get the use of cursors, and you can choose the type of cursor depending on whether you are reading, updating, inserting, or deleting records(a read-only cursor is fastest of course).

    I have yet to see as clean of a database programming model as ADO.

    I'll be getting to try Chilisoft as soon as my new RS6000 running AIX gets here. Since I've written a lot of ASP code already, I'm interested in trying this. However, I use lots of COM components, so it may not work very well. But I can see offloading some mundane tasks to UNIX servers running Chilisoft.

  • [naken.cc]
  • I really don't understand what the reason to port ASP to *BSD (or Linux for that matter) is. Their is a decent, cross platform scripting language in the shape of PHP and the primary benefits of using ASP are only available for Win32 platforms.

    ASP on Win32 is pretty good in that it allows you to interface with the COM API's (and i'm assuming, been a while .NET framework). This structure does allow you to develop more complex sites & puts it into competition with JSP / Servlets. Without the COM support it's just a scripting language framework, and VBScript doesn't really compare well to the other freely available scripting languages.

  • I didn't say it was. I said it was pointless running it on a platform that doesn't have COM.
  • Your example is a VBism. Under JScript you can do Session("aJSObject")=aJSObject. Can't say for PerlScript, but I imagine it's similar with perl hashes.

    Besides, the IIS Session support is so slow that you wouldn't want to use it for any substantial amount of information. Generally it's only wise to put a UID in there and then have a header block that uses that UID to reconstitute your state objects (generally DB-backed). After about 500 users, apparently using ADO/MS-SQL is actually faster than getting info out of the IIS session object!

    Besides, the WebLogic servlet container docs explicitly recommend against using their session object for storing anything but strings. Not to mention the fact that even though JSP is compiled, it's still slower at code execution than interpreted ASP. (But the programming functionality and more scalable platforms make up for that, in my book.)

  • Re:No point without COM (Score:3)

    by tshak ( 173364 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @05:08AM (#352455) Homepage
    It's not entirely true that ASP is useless without COM.

    Yes, you can do if-then logic... even do-while as well! (Okay, I'll be fair). You can't do:
    HTTP Get's/Put's/Post's
    Basic TCP/IP (FTP/Telnet/POP3/SMTPetc.)
    Encryption (Hashing or otherwise, unless you want to write your own functions)
    File Uploads
    File I/O (FileSystemObject is a COM)
    DB Connectivity (ADODB)

    Plus, you can't connect to EJB's, CORBA ORB's, and it uses VBScript syntax (YUCK!). Personally, every piece of ASP code I've seen is a mess... even if it's written REALLY well, it's hard to maintain. I hate the fact that I have to connect to a COM to do anything. If I need a _simple_ language, I'll use something more intuative like Cold Fusion (Sorry, conn=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") is not as intuative as CFQUERY, nor is using a ( ' ) as a comment mark). If I need a powerful and more verbose language, I'll use JSP or PHP.

    To be fair, ASP does run faster than JSP/PHP/CF (at least on windows) and seems to be more stable.
  • Philosophiocally, I have no hassle with someone wanting to port software X to platform Z. I just do not know how practical it would be.

    Geeks devoted to linux, *BSD, etc have traditionally not be intimidated by ease of use issues, at least when it comes to their choice of tools. They may like ease of use, but they want the tools to be solid, flexible, with minimim strings attached, etc. I would say that aside from any technical reasons to prefer ASP over other solutions, the Microsoft connection is going to be troubling to a lot of folks. Too many strings attached, philosophically and otherwise. That may be a killer on its own.

    I do not know what the advantadges or disadvantadges are to ASP. The arguments of "ease of use" may be true, but I am skeptical of this on the basis of hidden costs, the gotchas that MS typically embeds as features into their products and protocols, but which look suspiciously like bugs. Anyone who has looked at their OSes can get a taste of that, and knows what that means.

  • I work with a web hosting company, and we looked at using Chili!Soft ASP as an alternative to having to having to keep NT boxes up and running reliably. We also thought it would be less expensive than an NT server license. We were wrong. Linux+Chili!Soft ASP costs about the same as an NT server license and isn't totally compatible.
    The only place I see a fit for Chili!Soft ASP is where you have single language ASP developers who need more horsepower than an NT box can deliver.

    Donald E. Foss

    Need cutting edge web hosting? Find us at www.coloexperts.com [coloexperts.com]!
    Need cutting edge web hosting? Find us at www.coloexperts.com [coloexperts.com]!
  • However, I think that an ASP port for UNIX should be completely free, opensource and so on.

    The Free ASP port is now available at: ftp://ftp.CLUE.org/a.tar.gz
  • I dont say this to argue with you, but looking at python it doesnt seem any easier to use than Perl, rather Perl seems to fit in the way I think - I can juggle data easily in a few lines that would take an age in another language.
    To be honest it comes down to using the language that best fits the way you think and is best for that particular application.

    The previous post about candygrammar is very true, it actually means that to do something in ASP would take me longer than in Perl because allthough it might look relatively simple it is also less powerful.

    Now, completely unscientific (so no flames please!) I ran a very short script on Perl(linux) and ASP(win2k & IIS) and the ASP outperformed it. The testing conditions were not scientific at all, but I still wouldnt switch to ASP for a couple of reasons:
    • It is not a great web language, if you are a web developer then imho you are shooting yourself in the foot from the start deciding to use ASP.
    • Easily most of the errors I see on web sites are ASP errors, while this may be due to them being written by monkeys it still doesnt fill me with confidence.
    Of course it the chillisoft software is of short term use for porting, but if you are thinking long term and you are on a unix server you might as well eventually port it to php/perl (etc).

    --
  • Maybe technically, but in reality most people mean the IIS/MS kind. I have a big ASP book and take my word for it, it does not talk about perl.
    --
  • Wow, looks like I hit a nerve. I said I'm not talking about what ASP actually is, just what people usually mean when they say ASP i.e vbscript ASP, by people I dont mean rabid foaming at the mouth geeks such as yourself but real people.
    I don't use ASP, but I have a 1300 page book published by Wrox on my shelf called "Active server Pages 3.0", they mention perl exactly once on page 13 referring to it as a cgi language. All job adverts i've seen mention ASP as the vbscript kind. Another poster says most ASP books refer to vbscript. Chillisoft call their software "ASP" but hey, guess what they dont use fucking perlscript or python. Maybe i'm wrong to say ASP and infer a particular kind but i'm certainly not alone.
    The whole damned story is about chillisoft who dont do perlscript OR python, how dumb are you to not understand context?
    Now I start to wonder who really is trolling. Chill out.

    --
  • Chili Soft belongs to Sun.
    Sun produces SunOs/Solaris which is BSD compliant.
    So, besides recompiling ASP, what is actually making this port a difficult thing, or at least, worth performing the mentionned study?
    --
  • THANK YOU. Jesus the leetism astounds. ASP isn't a 'language'. You can use just about any scripting language you want within it. Many folks use PERL, I use javascript. I've found it to be pretty powerful, not to mention fast as hell.
  • "ASP is pretty poor" So you're suggesting COLD FUSION?! Are you on crack? ASP is a hundred times faster and more powerful than CF, in my opinion. Do you actually have valid complaints against the technology, or is this an anti-MS bias at work?
  • One more time, say it with me: ASP does NOT equal VBSCRIPT.
  • Correct, the two aren't equivalent. But, that's from a 'programmer's' perspective. From an employer's perspective, ASP=VBScript. I got severely chastised at an employer once for doing a few ASP pages in JScript. The company standardized on VBScript, so just cause you could do it in JScript didn't matter. I may as well have written in in TCL, as far as the mgt was concerned, because no one else there knew JScript. I think the overwhelming majority of code examples and books you'll see covering "ASP" focus on VBScript, furthering the perception, which can become reality for many.

  • It's not entirely true that ASP is useless without COM. COM is what makes ASP great, but ASP is mainly popular among web developers and developees because it's free on Microsoft servers.

    Chili!Soft is good because it lets you take non-COM ASP scripts from a Microsoft server and stick it on Apache -- and, if a BSD port happens, on MacOS X as well. This saves oodles of time in moving scripts to Perl or Python or another UNIX-based language of your choice, since you can take your time porting the VBScript itself.

  • It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.

    Firms can hire vaguely technical people to write ASP that could never get their head round PERL or PHP.

    What a bunch of bullshit. Do you think you're in a mighty realm of super languages using PHP or Perl? Give me a break : They're both TRIVIAL. They're EASY. This whole whatever is mainstream must be easier than what I use nonsense is so bloody absurd I seriously question the integrity of anyone who spouts it (ignoring the fact that ASP is the basically plug in architecture and people don't actually program in "ASP", they use one of the plug-in languages which is usually either JScript or VBScript, though it could also be PHP, Perl, etc.).

    People use ASP because it does the job in a lot of environments and it does it well. I use JScript for the basic scripting needs and it does the job admirably. When I want to do something that it doesn't cover I pull out Visual C++ and spit out some COM objects (because of course I'm 31337 and you sVxx0R with your crappy interpreted languages...granny).

    Check the elitism at the door because 9 times out of 10 the clown yapping it doesn't have a clue what (s)he's talking about and is merely trying to convince others that they're special.

  • ADP (Score:1)

    by Z4rd0Z ( 211373 )
    There is an alternative that is already available on FreeBSD (and Linux) that rarely gets mentioned, and that is ADP (Aolserver Dynamic Pages). This uses Aolserver [aolserver.com], an open source, multithreaded, and very fast web server that has a built in tcl interpreter with a very rich set of functions. ADP pages embed tcl scripts directly in html. You can also write .tcl scripts that produce html for your pages.
    I think the reason it is not so well known is because of the name (AOL?? Ugh!), and because tcl is not as popular as perl or python or whatever.

  • It seems like ChiliSoft must be thinking of the new Mac OS. Otherwise, why bother with a port?

    This naturally leads to the question of how many websites they think are hosted on Mac now and how many they expect to be hosted on Macs running OS X. I can't believe there would be a lot of sites hosted on Macs. Of course, I can't imagine there can be much call for ASP on any *nix flavor because PHP/Perl/Python etc. etc. are free and they can do the job better than ASP. So maybe any increase in market share is a good thing from ChiliSoft's point of view.

  • And Schumacher will continue to win until Max Mosley decides that letting Schumacher and Ferrari cheat isn't the best way to get higher TV revenues.
  • another option, another reason not to use 2000/nt server. an empty toy box is... well, a boat i guess, but i cannot imagine that a port from linux could be incredibly time consuming. cobalt would double their market immediately. they should also port it to solaris so that it can run on those nifty $1000.00 boxes. btw, where can one get cheap ram for those (x1/t1) boxes?
  • SunOS 5.x is actually a BSD/SysV hybrid. The SysV stuff theoretically makes it easier to port all the HP-UX/SCO/(name another unix) stuff to Solaris. Personally? I liked the BSD style.
  • Chili!Soft does run on Solaris. Go see [chilisoft.com] for yourself.
  • This would be good, if php wasnt around for bsd.
    Considering what PHP can do, you dont need ASP.
    PHP is everything you would want with asp, and more. The best part is that its free.

    TCO is $0. Asp is not, Cfm is not, php is.



    Fight censors!
  • Php being free doesnt always have to be a factor, however, what will always be important is what it can do and how well it can do it. The fact is php kicks asp's ass every which way. Its faster, its open source, and its free.
    Asp is a joke, kinda like front page extensions.



    Fight censors!
  • Tell them you will use asp2php on their site and optimise it for $. They might be happy to pay, but if they dont, they will pay either way.


    Fight censors!
  • I agree that asp has its place, and it is with windows, but thats another topic. Php being faster with zend is no lie, its very fast, any we are talking about the newest version of php and asp right? It wouldnt make sense if you could only support 1.x asp....


    Fight censors!
  • Thats true, but will this Asp be as good as asp on a winbox? or will it be a dumbed down version? And even then, what would it take to get asp2php on the fly so that it ran for every customer?


    Fight censors!
  • What would it take to get asp2php set up to convert on the fly? So people could write all their asp code and then still have it work?
    I dont see the point unless you have people with asp that need it, but if you do could you use php with a major recode? Is there a version of php that supports asp stuff (not just the operators and syntax)?



    Fight censors!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • i'm sure the two people who will buy this product will be very pleased.

  • ChiliASP and Others... (Score:3)

    by Anml4ixoye ( 264762 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2001 @03:05AM (#352483) Homepage
    We use ChiliASP here because one of our outside agencies had their site developed by an outside vendor who did the whole thing in ASP. The conversion has been an absolute nightmare. ChiliASP is great for those hardcore ASP developers who need to keep programming because they can't (or won't) switch to PHP or CF but want the stability of a non-NT platform. BUT...There are quite a few drawbacks to it. The first noted was cost. We initially looked at running it on a Solaris box but the cost was absolutely prohibitive. When then ported it to a Linux box, but now we have the whole thing running on a NT/IIS System. Why?
    • Flexibility - ChiliASP does not support everything that ASP is capable of (Mainly because some of those things *require* native IIS.
    • Stability - Stability you say? Yep! ChiliASP caused a lot of memory leaks on the Linux box. We constantly had to reboot it, and it never seemed to run quite right.
    • Cost (2) - We discovered that some native features of ASP are not available in ChiliASP without spending even more money on add-ons.
    So while I think that porting it to FreeBSD was only natural for ChiliASP as they want to support the most platforms possible, we probably won't be using it here. Currently we rely very heavily on Cold Fusion (which could be a whole topic on it's own) but someday I would love to go to PHP. ASP is great if you are on a properly configured NT platform, but if you are going to go open-source, go with a language designed for it, or at least one that is close (such as Cold Fusion).
  • Actually, most of the components that you reffers to are usually accessed via COM objects.
    It's pretty routine to do the real work in COM objects in ASP, btw.
    ASP+ (which became ASP.NET) has made large improvements in adding more COM objects, so now ASP has as wide or wider set of components as PHP.
  • Um, not.
    ASP is a framework, for which you can write in every language that you want.
    Perl, for instance, is one of them.
    And IIRC, there are some examples of perl ASP scripts that are installed with IIS.

    JScript, VBScript (Don't used this!), Perl, and a lot of other languages can be used to write ASP pages.
  • ASP is not very good with sessions, ASP+ is much better handling them.
  • You confuse ASP with VBScript, which is very limited.
    And ASP+VBS can do file uploads on its own, the rest it can't, though.
  • JS & VBS only for Chillisoft, sorry.
  • Exactamundo!! Mod parent up.

    Another point of using asp is that you can use the Visual Interdev IDE and the design time ActiveX controls included with it to write web "Application" with a richer functionality than with just plain ol' HTML. Please note, I am talking about INTRAnet or EXTRAnet applications (e.g. site management, order processing etc), where you can limit the delivery platform to IE. I would not advocate ASP's use for anything else as it is not that scalable. But as a tool for allowing the latest version of your application to be used anywhere on the corporate intranet (or even for home workers!) it's pretty good and more than fast enough for 50-100 simultaneous users.
  • I write asp in Perl. What's your problem again?
  • I've worked in Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP, Perl and C for CGI applications. All have their place, and although I prefer PHP, I'm glad ASP is coming to BSD. I just wish it was free. I have quite a few customers who approach me with ASP scripts, and I simply have to try and convert them into PHP (not as hard as it sounds - JScript is actually quite close to PHP in a lot of respects). There is a market for this, so as far as I'm concerned, good stuff...

    At the end of the day, this is going to be touted more of a success for FreeBSD (more commercial apps) than it is for Chilli. I'll just hope that it won't have all the problems that ASP had on IIS the last time I tried it. IIS sucks, ASP rules. :-)

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