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That was the first thought that occurred, but since this was an emergency situation the approval, installation and configuring would likely have taken longer than it took the phone company to repair the ADSL connection to our premises.

And our hosting account is too crappy to offer us any kind of control over the server - it's literally "web space", CGI support for perl scripts (which I'm not allowed to use) and nothing else.

I have heard good things about Mono, though - last I heard it lacked full compatability, but was generally a good solution. Chilisoft also produce an app that allows you to run ASP on unix, but I don't know if it supports ASP.NET... as an aside, it looks like it might have been bought out by Sun (web address redirects to a page on Sun's server now).

Seriously, why should anybody want to use Windows as a webserver? The only reason I can think of is when you are locked into MS-only technology like ASP which rules out Apache anyway.


Actually Chili!Soft provides software that makes it possible to run ASP on other platforms than Windows. This includes Linux, Aix, Solaris and you can use your own favourite webserver!

The software is quite stable. It just has one problem: VBScript sucks - not the implementation but the language specs. Therefor always use jscript when writing ASP.

ASP apps running on it that maketing had contracted out without IT knowledge

That's not a valid reason to stick with IIS.

"It's remarkably ... fair."

I agree that it's not as FUDy as before but c'mon... quotes follow:

"[bitching about samba] ... This potentially ties the OEM to a particular Linux vendor's distribution and its support programs."

As opposed to when you go with Microsoft you will get a wide variety and choice in Windows distributions? Of course underlying problem being MS' close nature of the protocol which had to be reverse-engineered. Look for them to tell you choice is bad later on.

"Linux does not support trust relationships across domains or forests and thus cannot act as a trusted element in Novell Directory Service and Windows NT Domain-based networks."

NDS for Linux has been available since some time in 2000.

"Linux offers both free and commercially available add-on clustering and load balancing solutions. However, these add-on clustering solutions come from various sources, do not conform to any set standards, and are often implemented on a particular Linux distribution."

Choice is bad bad bad. You don't need choice! Also, do I hear MS bitching about "standards"? How do I respond to that one? Someone help me.

"Linux offers support for ASP but it is non-native and requires an add-on program to Apache or some other Web server deployed on Linux."

Actually, several ASP implementations are available for Linux including some of the ones I cannot find right now; but choice is bad and we already established that.

"Linux now has over five options for a JFS. All of these are new to Linux and the depth of integration and regression testing can be scattered and the number of real-world implementations limited."

Ok, class... choosing the right filesystem for the desired function is bad, NTFS is your god. I know there was (but I can't find a link now) a Hans Reiser's technical paper on some of the things that are wrong with NTFS and why it is so slow. If anybody has a link post it please. Reality is, JFS, XFS have been around for a long time. While it is true that they have been implemented for Linux recently it's almost like saying NTFS is new to Win XP.

There's other arguments that I don't have time to respond to. Oh, and them bitching about GPL. Why doesn't everybody offer dual licensing for every GPL application? Option 1 - GPL; option 2 - MS EULA. That way they will understand that you don't have to accept GPL with any software in which case regular IP copyright protections apply; which is way less restrictive than MS licensing. I don't see any point in MS argument there.

...and neither is staying on IIS a reasonable option.

So, now what?

Well, there's always Chilisoft, which is now owned by Sun.

If you really want to use ASP on Apache I'll strongly recommend you take a look at Chili!Soft ASP.

It supports several OS'es including Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows.

Several different databases is supported as well, as severel different webservers are supported.

At work we have used both the Linux and the AIX version. We ported an application from IIS with minor difficulties.

ASP has been available on Apache for quite a while. For Linux, Aix, Solaris and even windows.
Costs a bit, but does have the advantage that you can swap all of your scripts over, for a much more stable platform, and if you run Windows Professional rather than Windows Server you certainly save a few bucks (the $500 for chillisoft asp is a lot less than the $1000 dollar difference between Win2000 Pro and Win2000 Server). Of course you can't actually run a production web server off of Pro due to Eula, but... You can also run asp on Linux, etc, however most real production shops that serve .asp pages have a ton of COM objects that would take forever to port to Java (now I understand why Micro$oft was so keen to do their N-Tier windows DNA with most of the business logic in DCom components on an application server somewhere, they realised that if ASP could be ported then realiance on Windows would be limited...)

I neither work for Chillisoft or Sun (who seem to own Chillisoft now...) Have only used the product once a long time ago, but I would certainly recommend looking into it for shops that are stuck on IIS. Anything to get away from evil IIS (which I am stuck working on now...)

We were able to port all of our web-based reporting code with only 1 line change (including COM objects). However if your ASP is truly hard-core then it might be more difficult.

If Amazon was written in ASP with heavy use of COM objects, you'd have to do a multi-million dollar re-write to make it into a CGI/C application.
ChiliSoft makes products that allow ASP to be run on many platforms, including Linux/Apache. Don't know the pricing, but its defiantly cheaper then Windows 2000 Server, and possibly the only commercial software besides a database you'd have to purchase when replacing a Win2k/MSsql solution.
Then again this is all irrevelant being they replaced one Unix with another.

FWIW, i think this is the ASP tool you're talking about.

i've never used it, but others have told me it's fab. Alternatives, woohoo!

I assume you saw The Apache::ASP home, a link you can find on the mod_perl home.

You can also run ASP on Apache using ChiliSoft ASP, which seems to be owned by Sun now. I've had little experience with the latter, but it seems to work out of the box with existing ASP sites and also has a web admin utility, along with the warm and fuzzy feeling of paying lots of money for something :-)

Apache and IIS are both pretty flexible, but Apache at its core is much simpler and forces you to specify what you want rather than having everything available by default and allowing you to stumble into what you might need. (Not that you'd do that, but I'll be a lot of sysadmins are wishing that IIS weren't so featureful right now...)

Chris

I don't remember the name of the product, but at least one ASP emulator for Linux is available.

Might be Chilisoft.

Chili!Soft does run on Solaris. Go see for yourself.

I find it highly amusing that a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc" 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).

I find it highly amusing that a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc" 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).

chilisoft ASP

chilisoft ASP

I remember when I went to the "training seminar" [a misnomer, it was a marketing pitch] for
Visual InterDev 1.0 in Pittsburgh, the Microsoft speaker swore up and down that activex, MTS, and ASP support was "just around the corner" for solaris, linux and macintosh....

http://www.chilisoft.com/

Try that out.

Simon

Ok, let's start here:

• We are not releasing 100 apps this year. I'm not sure where the idea that these apps were for immediate release came from. I will say that we have white papers started for over 100 different real (Not ICQ clones or panel monitors) apps that we want to do. To start with though, we are releasing:
  

Mohawk, the Apache Server Configuration program. (Will the guy that named his program Mohawk please email me?) iceSculptor, an absolutely kickass DTP program. (If anyone was at NetWorld in Atlanta this past month, you may have seen me demoing it.) and Mentor, a documentation program for Developers. Mentor is a help project manager that creates indexed and compressed help files that can be displayed in an html widget. Very nice stuff.

(By the time you see this, there SHOULD be a set of screenshots up on the products page. If not, check www.chilliware.net/shots/ for a few I did at NetWorld.)

• We are NOT Microsoft. We don't want to be Microsoft. We DO however, want to offer as many software solutions as MS does. As I posted on ZDNet the other day, I don't think that anyone can argue that too many desktop apps is a Bad Thing[tm].
  
• We are NOT ChiliSoft. I don't even want to get into that. Sigh.
  
• We are a new company. New in this case means about 10 months. However, this does not mean we are newbies. Each of our 100+ developers has been writing *nix apps for a while. Our CEO and most of the entire board, are all experienced software guys. This isn't a jump on the bandwagon type of company. Yes, we are privately held and financed. Not that it's anyone business, but alot of the funding from this company came from it's employees. Because we believe in what we're doing. There are no marble foyers or private jets here. We are in this for the long haul.
  
• We did not use Natalie Portman as our spokes model, as rumor has it she does not like grits. That is just wrong. (Couldn't resist, sorry.)
  
• Our desktop apps are closed source. I don't want to get into the licensing thing here, but, I can assure you that all of our code is written from the ground up. I'm sure that if , in the future, someone has a claim that we have used their code, we will be happy to allow them or an external auditor to review said code. Simple as that. It has been job #1 for us that we don't stand on the backs of others in the creation of our software. We are self made. The only Open Source stuff we are using is in our Linux distro, and that will be Open Source, as required by the GPL. We aren't doing this to exploit anyone or anything.
  
• We WILL be releasing some source code in the near future. In particular, we will open up the source for some of our widgets. This will allow other developers to use some of the cool stuff we are doing in their own apps. At this time, I don't have details, but if you're curious to learn more, let me know.

We aren't the typical Linux company. We aren't riding the coattails of anyone else's work. We are not trying to corner the market on anything.
That's the beauty of Linux. The CHOICE. If someone doesn't want to use our software, that's fine. We're sorry to hear it, but, I understand your position.
The whole concept of our company is that we want to bring Linux home.
I really want my wife to be able to design a Christmas card on my Linux desktop machine, without having to run WINE or VMWare to use PrintShop.
I want my Mom to be able to write a letter, do a mail merge, and print said letters out, without having to use a word processor that uses 90% of available memory.
I want my daughter to be able to use an encyclopedia or web browser for her homework, and I want all of this to happen on my Linux Desktop. And I do not want to wait a couple of years for Microsoft to provide this "service" to us.

I know that it is hard to accept this kind of change to what we already know and expect. But remember that we are just trying to put Linux onto as many desktops as possible.
I would like to close now, but first I want to cordially invite you to pop into our offices in L.A..
Send me an email, and we'll make arrangements. Come in, talk to us, maybe join the team...

I'll be keeping an eye on the threads, but I probably won't post any more responses here. I have alot of work to do this week...and I would much rather SHOW you what we can do than just talk about it. :-)

Thanks for your comments everyone.
Scott McDaniel
Technical Development Manager
Chilliware, Inc.
http://www.chilliware.net
213-365-8700

www.chilisoft.com

ASP under UNIX. Ho yuss.

The Plan:

• Stage 1: We move from SQL Server to to MySQL
• Stage 2: We move from WinNT to Unix

I mean, I love PERL. And I kinda see how I ought to get into PHP. But ASP is a lot easier to pick up.

Also, speaking as a manager, ASP programmers are a lot cheaper (you can even train up dirt cheap Visual Basic programmers who are a penny a dozen).

--

• http://www.chilisoft.com/
  
• http://www.halcyonsoft.com/

I wonder how the backend database is supposed to be used from within ASP under Apache. Presumably Chilisoft have implemented at least the ADO object (or an emulation of it) that can be instantiated from within an ASP page...

[goes hunting]

Ah, yes. According to http://www.chilisoft.com/chiliasp/ar chdiag.htm, they've not only implemented Active Data Objects (ADO), but also the other base objects that come with ASP on IIS (FileSystem, TextStream, etc). That's cool. And the backend db looks to be pluggable, from that diagram; Oracle, MySQL and DB2 are mentioned.

With regard to instantiating other COM objects; according to http://www.chilisoft.com/chiliasp/ aspfaq.htm#com, no, it's not possible on native UNIX (figures). But a COM to Java bridge is available, so you can instantiate Java servlets as COM objects in your ASP scripts, and DCOM is also available, so you can continue to instantiate Win32 COM objects, just off of a remote Windows NT server!

Very cool!

I wonder how the backend database is supposed to be used from within ASP under Apache. Presumably Chilisoft have implemented at least the ADO object (or an emulation of it) that can be instantiated from within an ASP page...

[goes hunting]

Ah, yes. According to http://www.chilisoft.com/chiliasp/ar chdiag.htm, they've not only implemented Active Data Objects (ADO), but also the other base objects that come with ASP on IIS (FileSystem, TextStream, etc). That's cool. And the backend db looks to be pluggable, from that diagram; Oracle, MySQL and DB2 are mentioned.

With regard to instantiating other COM objects; according to http://www.chilisoft.com/chiliasp/ aspfaq.htm#com, no, it's not possible on native UNIX (figures). But a COM to Java bridge is available, so you can instantiate Java servlets as COM objects in your ASP scripts, and DCOM is also available, so you can continue to instantiate Win32 COM objects, just off of a remote Windows NT server!

Very cool!

For reasons beyond my fathoming (ie. Microsoft legacy lock-in), our firm uses Active Server Pages (ASP).

Basically server-side CGI in Visual Basic.

Quite why a server-side programming language has to be "visual" is beyond me. Also incomprehensible is why it takes two pages of ASP to do what PERL does in two lines.

It's a bunch of arse, I tell you.

But if you think that's confusing, what REALLY got my goat is that some idiot company came up with a way of serving Microsoft ASPs from UNIX! I don't know what drugs ChiliSoft are on, but I don't want any.

--

check it out

MainSoft
Chili!Soft

Have you checked out Halcyon's InstantASP or ChiliSoft's ASP implementation? Actually, ChiliSoft won't be supporting Linux 'til the end of 99, but they're already viable on several Unices. Also, if you're looking for something for the ASP-hosting crowd, ChiliSoft's product does FP & FP2000.

Have you checked out Halcyon's InstantASP or ChiliSoft's ASP implementation? Actually, ChiliSoft won't be supporting Linux 'til the end of 99, but they're already viable on several Unices. Also, if you're looking for something for the ASP-hosting crowd, ChiliSoft's product does FP & FP2000.

Have you checked out Halcyon's InstantASP or ChiliSoft's ASP implementation? Actually, ChiliSoft won't be supporting Linux 'til the end of 99, but they're already viable on several Unices. Also, if you're looking for something for the ASP-hosting crowd, ChiliSoft's product does FP & FP2000.