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Cobalt buys Chilli!soft
A number of folks have written to us regarding the purchase of Chilli!soft by Colbalt Networks. It seems that Cobalt is interested in Chilli's implementation of ASP for Linux for their own server appliances.
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I agree that choice is a good thing, but what else does ASP on linux give you? I have developed significant applications using ASP (on an MS platform), and then using mod_perl. My question is: With mod_perl freely available, why on earth would you want to pay for ASP? mod_perl (w/Embperl) wrecks ASP!
how old are you? 15 and 1/2?
I really believe that you're missing the point. Chilisoft offering ASP for linux is a big deal, COM or no COM. It gives those who choose the path of linux / unix more options than they had previously. We are actually currently evauluating Chilisoft with some VB scripts that we have lying around. Looks like it's going to work. Because of this, I may actually get those guys to let me switch over to Linux for our web server. They wouldn't even consider it before. That is a big deal to me.
His point was that a large percentage of the Internet is run on Apache servers, which is true. These would be administered by, uh, adminstrators, which could easily be 3% of your "userbase of... users".
Please consider having your brain replaced with something a little less noisy and less event driven.
And since when did sheer numbers have anything to do with quality?
ZicoKnowSquat
I do not think I would like to pour hit chili down my pants.
Instead, I prefer hot grits. (oh so pretty)
Chili con carne y gritas sounds right.
chile y arenas == chile and sand (from babelfish)
I dont think that Spanish has a word for grits in the sense of edible grits. I live in southern Texas and know a large bit of Spanish. 'arenas', meaning sands comes from the grits/sand/grittiness of material.
The dish of grits (finely ground corn) I don't think is eaten in Mexico.
VIVA LAS GRITAS CALIENTE!
The media is controlled by the Masons, so any such studies have been SUPPRESSED! But you knew that.
"Media" is plural, pinko-commie rat! It's clear from your ravings that you are a Catholic yourself. Don't dissemble with me; I'm, like, too quick.
Every time you invoke the name of the l*mbda, a bit of your soul is sucked into the pits of hell, and your mind corrupted. Recursion only makes matters worse.
Fool! Recursion with lambda is like a Tibetan prayer wheel: Lambda is the name of God, and every time it recurses, another prayer flies up to the heavens. Hence Stallman's halo.
what is the spanish phrase for chili and grits?
Chili con carne y gritas ?
Can someone contact the Spanish consulate on this?
I use VB because the time it takes to create a basic front end is sooo much faster than anything else.
IMHO Delphi clobbers VB the same way that PHP clobbers ASP: It's no harder to use, and it lets you do nontrivial things without having to write COM objects in C++ or whatever. ObjectPascal can be a bit frustrating for an experienced C++ programmer accustomed to having templates and other goodies, but Delphi lets you deal with messages on their own terms, it has real function pointers so different events can share the same handler, it's got a usable syntax for defining classes, etc. etc. The Delphi class library was written in ObjectPascal and was designed to be extended in ObjectPascal. Most RAD-worthy projects require no real code to be written, but once in a while you have to do it, and it's handy to be able to do it right there without any nonsense. And again, I doubt very much that the learning curve for VBish people is any worse than VB itself.
The syntax in general is a hell of a lot less bizarre than VB [1]. I don't buy the theory that people who can't program are best served by a language designed by people who can't program either. I understand that most VB programmers "need" to use VB for the same reason that a 14-year-old girl "needs" to buy all her clothes at Abercrombie and Fitch, but who's paying these people's salaries?
If there are any technical reasons to use VB instead of Delphi (other than purely psychological reasons related to successful marketing à la Abercrombie and Fitch above), I'd be interested to hear them.
------------------------------
[1] Last time I endured VB, some functions required parens while others didn't, some allowed named arguments, some allowed extra named and/or unnamed arguments outside the parens (wtf?!), newlines were syntactically significant, an if() without an endif had to be all on the same line, some errors threw exceptions while others used on-error-goto, etc. ad nauseam; it was an endless nightmare.
if you really think that ASP pages can only be scripted with JScript or VBScript, as opposed to Perl or Python or something else, there's no way that you can have much knowledge about ASP.
ASP/IIS works with Perl and Python right out of the box? No need to fuss around researching, purchasing, installing and configuring anything? I mean, since the subject at hand here is usability by novices I assume you're referring to something that novices can easily do.
Furthermore, you've certainly proven that he doesn't know much about ASP, but you forgot to mention whether all the specifics he gave were accurate or not. For example, he states:
Are you saying that's not accurate, or that its accuracy is irrelevant because he got something else wrong?
This is the original AC who dislikes VB and Perl (I'm bitter that nobody rose to the Perl bait . . . oh, well
this is what my employers pay me to write.
In this economy, if you can't find a job doing something interesting, you've nobody but yourself to blame. After the stock market bubble bursts I may possibly end up writing VB to put food on the table, but I can't see any reason to do it now.
why do they pay me to write VB? Because (with a few exceptions) I can build the same functionality in VB about twice as fast as in C++ and at very little cost in terms of performance.
That's because you're working someplace that only takes on projects which can be done in VB -- probably quick'n'dirty database frontends, judging from all the SQL you mention. Well, yeah, VB can do that, but there's a lot more out there.
As all the 3733T Linux gods out there will find once they leave school, those of us making a living in the Real World end up doing what the client pays for because otherwise we don't eat. Comprende?
Sounds like you're making excuses for yourself. There are a lot of people out here (me, for example) writing C++ for a living. Sometimes on special occasions I write a little awk, and I've been known to help out our web guy with some javascript (a fun little language, but often painful for a C++ programmer accustomed to being in complete control of what the program does). Mainly what I do is I come in here every day and write C++ code, and believe me I'm not starving. If you're under the impression that there aren't any C++ jobs out there, you're nuts. Look at the want ads. There's no need to rationalize the job you have if you'd rather be doing something else. You sound like a Cobol programmer, quite frankly.
On the other hand, we recently interviewed somebody with about the same skill set you describe. He advertised himself as a C++ programmer: "Oh, I spend about 10% of my time at work in C++. It's my favorite language." So we gave him our entry-level pop quiz on C++. After he spent an hour struggling to come up with wrong answers to a five-minute quiz, we began to doubt that he'd ever written a line of C++ code in his life. That's not the only time I've seen VB programmers lie outrageously. In fact, in every case where I've been able to check their claims against reality, they've been full of shit. VB seems to attract people who don't really give a damn about programming; they just want to get a respectable job and make a quick buck. They're con artists, for the most part.
one great advantage of VB which no-one's mentioned here yet is that it's possible (with a bit of lateral thinking) to come up with far filthier hacks than are available in most any other language
As all the highly productive VB "programmers" out there would find if they ever got a job where minimal competence was expected of them, those of us who earn our salaries don't have much patience with "filthy hacks". Comprende?
If they're too stupid to learn anything but VB, why haven't they learned anything but VB? If they have learned another language, they're not playing with VB any more. Therefore, I am in all cases 100% justified in stating that Visual Basic "programmers", much like Perl "programmers", have gangrenous lumps of filth-encrusted fat where their brains should be. They devolved in the very recent past from the lower primates, and they're receding into prehistory as fast as they can travel. A study was done a few years ago, which found that roughly 45% of Perl/VB "programmers" have at least one felony conviction in their histories -- and it's not harmless stuff like smoking weed, either. The ex-cons in the group had mostly been in for sex offenses, and quite a few for murder, kidnapping, and/or hard narcotics.
I don't know about you, but I really wouldn't care to hire a "programmer" (even to use a toy like Perl/VB) if I knew that "programmer" had a record of heroin addiction, child molestation, or sudden outbreaks of psychotic and deadly violence. Of course, your company may have more liberal hiring practices than mine, and if so I applaud you for trying to rehabilitate these poor creatures. Some of them probably can become useful members of society with a sufficient investment of patience and retraining. I just don't have the time or effort to invest in turning an illiterate, drug-addicted serial rapist/murderer into a productive software developer.
yeahh!@#! I found this wacked ass website with "anti-linux" pics..http://www.polyester.net..Check this out..
Click to en-large the anti-linux movement.. erm. ok.. They got something called "geek satire" also..
Oxygen with Linux? Science fiction could become science fact
Rare meteorite promises glimpse into creation and the source code of Windows2000
Hackers suspected as Microsoft 747 explodes in mid-air due to blue screen of death.
Cisco integrates routing, switching and underwear drawer technology.
IBM plans to change the shampoo world.
Microsoft Unveils Plans for X-Brush tooth brushes.
I think you do VB developers a disservice with your comments.
Show me five VB or Perl "programmers" who can get through a Stanford-Binet test without revealing a mentality on the level of a mountain gorilla with lesional brain damage. Okay, I'll settle for four. Produce four such prodigies and I'll concede the point.
45% of Perl/VB "programmers" engage regularly in acts of criminal sexual deviance, up to and including murder. Of children. Yes, children. Don't go giving me any liberal whining about how "society is to blame" or some such nonsense. This is a Libertarian forum and you won't get away with it. You'll howl in protest at this, but it's a fact: The only way to deal with a crime is swift and terrible punishment. This prevents the deceased criminal from harming any more innocent people, and it also serves as a deterrent -- "pour encourager les autres", as the man said.
Like it or lump it, your precious Perl/VB psychopaths will sooner or later end up in the electric chair where they belong.
Just ignore him. He probably knows he just stated the obvious and is just Karma Whoring. Signal11 is that you?
What you say is true (at least for quick and dirty database apps), but you missed my original point. I (the Python advocate) wasn't suggesting that C++ should replace VB. My point was that there are languages far superior to VB that, if supported by a refined IDE, would actually surpass VB's productivity.
The core VB language is a crock of stinking excrement; VB's reputation for productivity survives because of its superior IDE. If someone were to equip Python with such an IDE, pragmatic managers and programmers would see what utter garbage VB really is.
I, for one, would be interested in hearing what the pancake-eating ninja community feels about Cobalt Network's latest aquisition.
We should also consider resorting -- at choice moments, and only under great provocation -- to some of their other, less savory, tactics. I don't mean merely the kind of tactics that got Randal Schwartz, an innocent man, convicted of an imaginary felony. I mean what used to be euphemistically called "wet work". There are Open Source developers who have disappeared, and those who have died under extremely suspicious circumstances. Two can play at that game.
of me never visiting slashdot again, please raise your hand.
thank you
You're an idiot. This is classic Linux-loving tripe to presume that the non-MS options are superior to something like ASP. Wait, your exact exclusionary "I know Linux so I'm smart" bullshit line was "VB/VBScript monkeys to churn out pages". Whatever you stupid fuck.
I have developed countless sites using ASP. When I have a need not covered by the intrinsic objects I pull out Delphi or Visual C++ and create an ISAPI or COM module that I use from ASP. However I'm sure that is far beyond your idiotic, monkey brain's comprehension so I'll leave it at this: You don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about, like the majority of your Linus loving idiotic pals. You guys are all of bunch of clown idealists that define your world by what you know. You have no relevance.
is your mom hot? got any pixxx ?
... a Beowulf cluster of these?
First of all, Apache is an awesome web browser. 60% of the web sites are served using Apache. I assume your discontent with Apache lies with its poor configuration tools, or lack thereof. I agree with you on that point and it's in this area that IIS/Apache kicks its ass.
Apache, like any other Open Source endeavour, does not put a lot of effort into documentation and configuration tools. Those are the boring areas that do not map well in an Open Source project. Microsoft can pay people to do the boring stuff like that, but Open Source projects work a bit differently.
You sir, are HYPOCRITE! Your trolling is meaningless and incoherent. You don't present any facts
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. I am not a hypocrite: I live by the truths I speak. Nor am I a troll; I am an honest freedom-loving citizen trying to restore some measure of sanity to a world gone mad. My words are not meaningless, as you demonstrate by replying to them; it is not incoherent, as I ensured by means of extensive lexical and semantic analysis before pressing "Submit". Finally, all of my facts are quite accurate. I defy you to produce a study (in a respectable refereed journal) indicating that any less than 45% of Perl and VB programmers are chronic felons, sexual criminals, and multiple murderers.
You . . . only bash people who are honestly earning a living working in VB.
An outright absurdity. Were they honest, they would code in Scheme like decent programmers do.
I have it on record that members of CRAP are chronic masterbators!!
Again, you have released a cloud of murky gibberish for no good reason. All programmers are chronic masturbators. It comes with the territory. This is so generally known that one of the results of the Vatican II conference in the early 1960's (back in the very early days of the profession when the phenomenon was already well-understood) issued a general plenary indulgence absolving all programmers of guilt WRT the sin of Onan. This is on record at the the Vatican for all to see. Search for the bull Vos Caecusimus
We must struggle against COBOL by surrepticously converting all COBOL code we come upon to Visual Basic or Perl.
Visual Basic is the Cobol of the present decade, and Perl is the Visual Basic of the UNIX world. All are of equal value.
I remain unmoved by your sophistries.
s/browser/server/
i don't know anyone who actually wants to work with VB. I thought I did a few years ago but thankfully I woke the fuck up. VB people almost always seem like converted COBOL hags who don't the first thing about programming but move on to VB as some kind of seniority rank. You know what I hear from the people who do work on VB? I hear them talk about reports. That's it. They're always running some kind of report. What kind of existence if that?
for my penis!
It's lonely down there!
(and can withstand a limited amount of hits per day before my bandwidth quota is exceeded)
yumm chilli and hot crits
is they didn't even ask me for my opinion. I thought me and Cobalt had a good thing going.
thank you
yeah, what he said.
Easier said than done. Have you actually TRIED to do this? The ADO performance is pathetic (actually the performance as a whole sucks), and try using the ODBC drivers available for Linux. "Any COM object built for Solaris or AIX can be called from Chili!Soft ASP code." - Yeah, show me one COM object built for Solaris. If you want to develop for Linux use PHP3. ASP on Linux is as good as Apache on NT.
There is a free 'developers' version that you can download at http://www.instantasp.com/prods/products.htm , get there and you'll see that they address the COM object issue and VB applications as well.
Many advantages come from using ASP on an NT machine, which most M$ advocates will tell you about:
- there's tons of programmers with working experience in ASP
- the support is there if you want to pay for it (*anywhere*). Try to find a good PHP programmer for your staff in Bogota, Colombia? How many can you grab?
- you keep your investment in "legacy" M$ applications. That's right, you can move everything to iASP and even use mySQL via JDBC instead of M$-SQL 7.
- you get your programmers the same environment they're used to -> VInterdev or Frontpage or HomeSite etc.
- It's java servlet based so it runs on *any* java capable server/platform (unlike Chilisoft)
Think about it, there is a very good reason for this. Ok, PHP is an alternative, but ISPs can not just refuse the NT/ASP web sites and if this technology lets them serve them as well...
Last thing I knew they we're working on something called "Chili!Dog" it was their hack of WINE to support all the COM/Win32 stuff in the VBScript they licenced from Microsoft.
So as long as WINE is GPL (it is, right?) they would have to open at least some part of it. But since they licensed VBScript/Jscript from Microsoft, so they obviously can't open source that. They also re-wrote ADO and I believe some parts of ODBC.. I guess they could open that up.
They used to use MainSoft's Win32 port, but they dropped it due to constant problems, and I believe a lack of Linux support. MainSoft is also was MS used to port IE to solaris, so you have an idea of the quality, hehe.
Anon
Were they honest, they would code in Scheme like decent programmers do.
Any American who hasn't been duped by the triumverate of evil (Vatican-MIT-Pepsi Co) knows that Scheme is the ANTI-C, and bears the mark of the beast. Every time you invoke the name of the l*mbda, a bit of your soul is sucked into the pits of hell, and your mind corrupted. Recursion only makes matters worse.
I defy you to produce a study (in a respectable refereed journal) indicating that any less than 45% of Perl and VB programmers are chronic felons, sexual criminals, and multiple murderers.
The media is controlled by the Masons, so any such studies have been SUPPRESSED! But you knew that. Our underground network transmits the truth through the kerning of text in the TeX algorithm. An elementary analysis of any recent Math publication would reveal as much.
Visual Basic is the Cobol of the present decade, and Perl is the Visual Basic of the UNIX world. All are of equal value.
Your COMMUNIST leaning shine through in your obvious attack on the free market. Your equalization of Perl with COBOL shows your lack of knowledge in theTransitive Economics of Distributed Automota.
All Americans must take arms against those who wish to corrupt our children with functional programming and turn them into MASTERBATING HOMOSEXUAL CATHOLICS.
you must be knew here.
looks to me like Cobalt is making a concerted effort to offer an Intranet-in-a-box
You think? You have a gift, my friend. You have the ability to see things that us mere mortals overlook. Please use your powers for the good of mankind.
Seriously, even though the implementation of ASP is clever and functional, PHP can do everything that ASP can do, faster and cheaper. Unless you have everything already ASP designed but you suddenly need to go UNIX/Linux, what is the point?
Apache may be popular, but text based configuration should be an option, not the sole choice.
The IIS/ASP/Visual Basic platform may not appeal to pure techies, but it does appeal to business folks who love it's object based structure. Encapsulation of business logic in COM objects, easily accessible by ASP/Visual Basic, turns them on. This is where Apache/{PHP|Perl} really drags the rear.
At first I thought you were some newbie who has been reading /. for two days, but your UID is 2445! So the obvious question is: ARE YOU ON CRACK?
good point. excuse my bastardization of the english language in the previous post.
Charles Crystle, the founder of Chili!Soft, is using his $15 million from the sale to set up community technology labs in Nicaraugua and opening a musicians' incubator in Silicon Alley -- what he's doing is the real story. You can see what he's doing here.
ASP is a defacto standard! That just shows how many useless/clueless IT people there are in the world.
I've used ASP extensively... and it bites! PHP absolutely destroys it on every level *including* ease-of-use. If you what a little more power, then yes mod_perl with HTML::EmbPerl is the all-in-one powerhouse solution!
Hey, and you don't need to restart IIS every few hours!
Obviously some MCSE guy that doesn't understand that M$ produces proprietary crap! Yes, I've tried out the "let's all pump out the OLE automation objects! hardcore, man!". It just plain sucks! ASP infinitely extendible?!? Well, as far as the M$ platform is concerned, I guess, but let's face it. Microsoft hasn't made anything "infinitely extendible" in their lives!
Hubs, routers, print servers, converters, etc. So many of these devices seem to be purple? Is there some signifigance to this? Barney syndrome?
That is to say, none.
he must beone of those microsoft plants. he's probably been on sabbatical for 2 years. excuse him.
That's what babelfish says. Translated back, it's "Chile and sands". Mmmm, tasty.
This ever-lasting struggle to look a bit more like Windows is so undignified.
Who cares?
PERL/Tk = Visual Basic
PHP = ASP
Well, in a word . . . No. Perl/Tk is not Visual Basic. It's an entirely different language, with an entirely different (and much more difficult to use) GUI library, and NO IDE, NO visual development, no nothing. It's not even close. Furthermore, there's no COM. COM matters to these people. It's a very powerful architecture and they have a significant investment in it.
PHP isn't ASP for the same reasons (especially COM; see above). The customers I'm talking about do not want to learn a new language. If you want their business, give them what they want. If you don't, that's fine, but don't pretend that you're doing anything but deliberately handing over the entire market to Microsoft -- and merely out of boneheadedness. The average user will not learn to do things your way. You can compete effectively, or get marginalized. Your choice.
Configuring linux boxen *is* easy.
Fact: Setting up Apache with PHP is ten times as hard as setting up IIS with ASP. Again, your choice: Compete or die.
Actually if you think about it for a moment, you'll realize this was always an option, before or after the buyout.
Wow, Linux enthusiasts are experts of EVERYTHING. Astounding!
I've read through countless articles now by obviously defunct idiots, probably with absolutely no experience in this field, extolling the benefits of PHP, Python, blah blah blah. ASP is crap, everything else rulez d00dz! The classic, patronizing "We know how to install Redhat [or at least we pretend] so we're smart!" line is that it's the dummies who use ASP, while all the real geniuses use PHP, et. all.
History has shown me time and time again, and I am in a position to know, that the idiots that make these claims have no skills. These people are the bottom feeders of the software development world that manage to get nothing done while they advertise the next silver bullet that the Linux/open source movement has proposed that'll save the day! It's all a defensive gesture because they're so busy wasting oxygen that they have to defend their existence somehow : They see the light!
Meanwhile, all those "dumb" M$ croonies are busy putting out page after page of productive solutions for clients. ASP is not an all encompassing solution : It was never meant to be! From a basic foundation ASP is merely a scripting plug in (any language, include PerlScript, BTW, can fall under the ASP umbrella), plus a core set of objects that exist under any of those languages : Objects to find out states from the server, get put and post variables, write out information, etc. This is a SIMPLE technology, and it is meant to be. The power comes through the instantiation of COM/OLE Automation objects via ASP scripting : I don't fuck around with some wanky all encompassing language if I need to do something hardcore -> I pull out Visual C++ 6, or even Delphi, and crank out an OLE Automation object (or an ISAPI module but that's a whole different story). Voila, suddenly ASP is infinitely extendable! ASP has full object awareness, and has _NO_ limits. All you experts that are apparently grossly unaware of that need to shut your fat, completely ignorant mouths because the shit that comes out is offensive. And for the next yokel that spouts out about the superiority of PHP, etc, learn that some of us work for solutions, not to circle jerk with a bunch of our open source buddies.
Bye bye now ya hear.
does seem to attract an unusually high percentage of pretenders (even by IT standards!).
Heh: "even by IT standards". I hear you so loud and so clear it hurts . . .
And if the hypothesis about VB programmers' fear of exploration postulated above is even remotely correct, the vast majority of VB developers will either shy away from or horribly misunderstand the new features.
Most likely "horribly misunderstand". Those people will use whatever Daddy Gates tells them to use, and they'll praise it to the high heavens. Understanding it is a different matter entirely; they generally have a rather dim grasp even of the features VB has already.
> If they're [not] too stupid to learn anything
> but VB, why haven't they learned anything but
> VB? If they have learned another language,
> they're not playing with VB any more.
Whoah! I spent last summer working in a VB-only development shop (Guido forgive me, but I was stuck in the boondocks and desperate for a summer job) and now that I think about it this statement rings true with EVERY LAST ONE OF MY FELLOW "PROGRAMMERS". I'm not about to imply that everyone who uses VB is an drooling oaf, but it does seem to attract an unusually high percentage of pretenders (even by IT standards!).
I can't even begin to articulate how frustrating it was to attempt to point out to these clowns how much more languages like Java or Python (not to mention C++, but it's inappropriate for RAD IMHO) have to offer. They simply would not listen.
As far as I can tell, M$ is just playing catchup to other languages with VB7's new features. And if the hypothesis about VB programmers' fear of exploration postulated above is even remotely correct, the vast majority of VB developers will either shy away from or horribly misunderstand the new features.
It'll be interesting to see how all the VB lemmings handle the indomitable rise of Linux. I'd like to think that the powers that be will take advantage of the era of transition to force VB programmers to switch to a jewel like Python + a great IDE, but a more likely outcome (given the above hypothesis) is that some VB port will emerge (other than Instant Basic for Java, which apparently didn't make an appreciable impact).
> Not strictly true; it is quite possible to
... VB7 ... back to the drawing board ...
> develop GUI-less apps (e.g. Windows NT
> services) in VB.
I'm well aware of that. I should have phrased my indictment of VB more clearly.
>
As I maintain in the post entitled "VB Programmers' Resistance to Other Languages", I don't see any VB7 feature that hasn't existed in real languages for years. Of course, that won't prevent Microsoft's worshipful hordes of VB slugs from ooing and ahhing (after VB7 emerges) about what a unique combination of ease and power their language offers. I suspect that although average VB developers won't take advantage of most of the new features, they'll use the new features as justification for their pathological fear of anything non-VB.
VB is a simple language for high productivity development of GUI business apps. Unfortunately, VB's sedimentary feature accumulation has destroyed its potential for soundness and beauty; the language is a mess.
Python preserves VB's RAD abilities without stooping to impure/obsolete language design (witness VB's awkward arrays with their host of accompanying keywords versus Python's elegant lists).
I believe that the only serious obstacle to Python becoming cross-platform-VB-done-right is its lack of a refined IDE (Python will probably never overcome VB on Windows because of M$ marketing/FUD, but look at the Linux opportunity!).
What do you think?
First, I don't understand why a company would pay so much for chili. Given the current price of ground beef in our market economy, and...
:)
Oh. Sorry. Am I the only person who thinks that "Chilli!Soft" is a really dumb name? They should be happy about being bought by a reputable company. (read: with a marketable name...)
I guess I just lose it when they start talking about that "integrating Chili!Soft Active Server Pages technology". I'd never buy Microsoft chili on the web; I'm sure it'd taste like ASP!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
>Not EVERYONE who uses VB is totally incompetent. You make it sound as
>if it's completely useless. It does have some very nice uses, although
>it'll never be my programming language of choice.
>This is an elitist attitude, and THIS is what will keep people from
>even WANTING to learn another language. (The attitude of 'well you're
>to stupid to learn anything but VB')
These people *ARE* too stupid to learn anything but VB. If they weren't they wouldn't be using VB....
When I try to follow that link, it just comes up blank.
Politas
It's a product that lets you run MS' Active Server Pages on a Linux web server.
Basically, it means that you can let your users use Frontpage without worrying about what's supported and what isn't.
Politas
Why do we need IIS? Apache is a perfectly good http server. Or are you referring to the integration with MS authentication in IIS? If so, then what is needed for that is an Apache-Samba interface. On the other end, we could use a Mozilla*-Samba interface to give the equivalenmt IE functionality
Anyone feel like working on that?
*of course, a browser-independant system would be preferable
Politas
Looks that way to me as well....I'd imagine there might be more middleware stuff working with ASP than with PHP...
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
They're doing one using Mozilla as the basis for the editors, parsers, etc, It's in very early stages, though.
And since when did sheer numbers have anything to do with quality?
Uh, that would be since the original poster implied that Apache must be good since it has a 60% share.
Congratulations on having my earlier post fly completely over your head.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Nice flame!
Heh, I really hope you didn't take it the wrong way. There aren't all too many ways of saying, "I don't think you know what you're talking about" in a delicate way, but I hope you can see why I had my doubts from what I quoted. Your reply helped to clear things up. If you've ever stumbled upon my user info, you'd see that I'm no stranger to being moderated down for flaming the bloody hell out of people talking garbage around here, and I'm sure I won't be a stranger to it in the future either, but I didn't think you had any malicious intent in what you wrote, so I really was trying to get my point across without stirring things up (As was the case with that seemingly nice British guy who also replied to me in this thread). Again, I hope you didn't feel truly flamed, I was just trying for a little heat around the edges. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
First of all, Apache is an awesome web browser. 60% of the web sites are served using Apache.
Of course, Linux has a userbase of maybe around 3% of computer users. I'll leave it to the original poster to decide what that says about Linux's "awesomeness" or lack of it.
Consistency, my dear Slashdotters, consistency.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
VB != VBScript.
Oh well. Looks like it does support VBScript.
Look Ma! I'm a Unix progammer now...
You're thinking free as in beer, which is wrong.
I'd happily pay cash for any piece of decent software. Programmers have to eat, pay rent, wear clothes, etc. just like any other people.
The big question is, will it become open source?
You pay the $1,000 (or whatever it happens to be) and you get the source code along with it (with some appropriate license agreement like SCSL)
That's what matters most.
Oh, BTW, although it does ASP, it doesn't do ActiveX which is the big hurdle. ASP is easy, it can be parsed through a perl filter to turn it into PHP. ActiveX is the problem - some things need those COM objects!
Matt
>So as long as WINE is GPL (it is, right?)
Uhhhh... no.
It's under what (I guess) is called the WINE License which is a lot closer to the BSD license than the GPL.
And no, there's no provision (as far as I can tell) that stipulates that all files you link into an original work have to be open. Derived works have to be, but not the original, as long as it's linked in, not included in the source code. So linking closed-source VBScript/JScript would be ok. Of course, this is only my interpretation and IANAL (duh).
--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Maybe its his little brother .....
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
See Apache::ASP
http://www.nodeworks.com/asp/
IIS may be popular, but GUI based configuration should be an option, not the sole choice.
The Apache/CGI/PHP platform may not appeal to business folks, but it does appeal to techies and sysadmins who love it's simple text based structure. Encapsulation of business logic in text files, easily accessible by ASP/Perl/Python/tcl/C/C++/Java/Pascal/PHP/Pike/Obj ective C/Javascript, turns them on. This is where IIS/ASP really drags the rear.
When I worked for ChiliSoft (just an internship in QA) I spent a lot of time thinking about this.
Chili!Soft's primary target has been corporations who want to use VB/VBScript monkeys to churn out pages, then serve up set pages on rock-solid unix servers. The cost difference between good developers that know things like PHP, Perl, or Python and dime-a-dozen VB junkies is enough to make the cost of Chili!ASP negligable.
Chili!Soft is not claiming that ASP is the best technology, they only recognize that
Would I buy Chili!ASP for a home machine? No. Would I choose to use Chili!ASP if I was starting a web project from scratch? No - I would probably use zope. Would I encourage a company with web aps in ASP (or a large exisiting VB team) to switch from Windows+IIS to *nix+Apache+Chili!ASP? Definitely!
Chili!ASP has been on unix systems for a while. Solaris and AIX were first, back in 98./p?
I never claimed that ASP is all about VB, or even that all VB programmers are on the level of trained monkeys. It is possible to do serious work with ASP, and I am sure some people do this. However, this is the norm, not the rule.
Most ASP development is done by cheap, marginally skilled VBScript developers glueing together technology that is beyond their true comperehension. It is possible for a skilled programmer to use VB as one of the tools in his toolbox, but such a programmer would be very exceptional in the VB crowd.
The main facts of my original statement remain.
I said nothing in my original post about, and I do not personally believe that, MS technologies are inferior to all linux has to offer.
I never even claimed that all linux options are superior to ASP. I did mention Zope, but that is not a linux-only technology (Zope works on windows just fine). You shouldn't be so quick to make harsh accusations and call names, unless your purpose was to troll (I choose to assume you aren't a troll, just unbelievably thin-skinned, self-rightous, immature, and paranoid enough to invent attacks that I never made.)
If you had actually read as far as my sig, you would have noticed that VB developers aren't the only ones I piss off.
I wonder if this means Chilli will keep giving out demo copies of FrontPage (**shudder**) at Linux conferences. Hey emmett, you remember when we returned that CD to them in micro shards in New York? That was fun....
Not necessarily. I haven't investigated the Chilisoft product in detail, but I would imagine that the COM system that makes ASP as powerful as it is is not available under non-MS operating systems. Without COM, and the ability to instantiate objects from ASP scripts, ASP is not particularly useful.
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
VB is a simple language for high productivity development of GUI business apps.
Not strictly true; it is quite possible to develop GUI-less apps (e.g. Windows NT services) in VB.
Unfortunately, VB's sedimentary feature accumulation has destroyed its potential for soundness and beauty; the language is a mess.
Agreed. Although with VB7 it looks like the VB developers are going back to the drawing board and reworking some of the cruft in the language (e.g. exception handling).
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
... apache+php offers more or less the same solution as [insert webserver] + ASP.
The primary difference between IIS + ASP and (e.g.) Apache + ASP (via Chilisoft) is that IIS supports COM component instantiation from within ASP. This means that you can write a GUI app using Visual C++ or another dev tool and, so long as you've separated out the GUI from the implementation in your object design, you can instantiate your middle tier objects (via COM) directly from within ASP. Essentially, you can replace the Win32 GUI layer in your app with an HTML GUI layer provided by IIS without having to rewrite any of the core business logic.
For businesses with an existing OO/Win32 investment, IIS + ASP can make a lot of sense. ASP by itself, without COM, doesn't offer anything more than Apache + modperl.
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
You're drastically overestimating the intelligence of VB idiots if you think they are even capable of learning a useful programming language. They're not.
Writing a large-scale, multi-tier business app in VB requires the same skills and knowledge as it does in any other language. I think you do VB developers a disservice with your comments.
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
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 believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
If part of your strategy is based on a product that allows you to compete with the Micro$oft market and provide compatibility with it, you'd be sunk if Micro$oft decided to buy the company and kill the product. M$ has been known to do this.
Perhaps Cobalt decided to buy Chilli!Soft before Micro$oft did.
--
I gave my boss a reality check. It bounced.
Not EVERYONE who uses VB is totally incompetent. You make it sound as if it's completely useless. It does have some very nice uses, although it'll never be my programming language of choice.
This is an elitist attitude, and THIS is what will keep people from even WANTING to learn another language. (The attitude of 'well you're to stupid to learn anything but VB')
The big question on everyone's minds - does this mean porting the ChiliSoft software so it's not just for Windows?
Also, is this an attempt to diversify so as to have some eggs in the MSFT basket?
Will in Seattle
Cool. This is a killer app then. Now it all makes sense.
[OT] By the by, I'm in favor of reviving hoopy as a word myself. Good show.
Will in Seattle
As someone with a little experience in the matter, I run IIS 5 on my computer here for my meager web page, *shamelessplus* Bead Game. All the scripting is done with ASP because it was the simplest method, at the time, to set up, (both perl and php are a pain to set-up with iis 4, which is what i was running beforehand). A little while ago, I was trying to make the switch over to linux, but that would mean reprogramming all of the scripts in my page, along with learning a new scripting language, and since i'm lazy, that wasn't an option. If i could have just plugged Chilli into apache and let'er run, then I'd be a linux user as we speak.
And on a another note, i tried using ChilliASP with a different web server for a while, but it's not fully functional, it does includes before and evaluation, so that pretty much forced me back to iis
-Reid
Go check it out at http://www.chilisoft.com
I know it does JavaScript. But, I think the vast majority of ASP pages are scripted using VBScript. None of those pages will be able to be served up by Chili!Soft ASP unless someone starts porting the VBScript engine as well.
Just wanted to point out for the many in here that appear to be confused, Chili!Soft ASP does not support VBScript. Therefore, Chili!Soft ASP does *nothing* for most of the people who think this is just what they've been looking for. A lot of people make this mistake, thinking ASP=VB. Nothing could be further from the truth, ASP supports many scripting languages, Chili!Soft ASP does not.
All very true, but certainly you'd have to agree that the syntax found in ASP (VBScript) is much easier for the new developer to pick up than what's found in Perl or PHP.
.02.
Just my
That's what I love about them high-school girls. I get older, they stay the same age... yes they do.
--Wooderson 1976
-- jimmycarter
The cake is a pie
While I was at the Linux World Expo in NY, I walked by the Chilli!Soft booth. Guess what they handed me? A Microsoft Frontpage 2000 CD.
What did I do with it? Brought it to Emmett over at the Slashdot booth, who promptly destroyed it. Then Emmett and some of the Slashdot crew, myself and a friend then walked over to Chilli!Soft's booth and promptly returned thier software which was in many many pieces.
Not pullin your leg.
http://geeksinnewyork.n3.net
That is our homepage for the trip, we've got pictures of Emmett trying to slice the CD with my lock blade knife.
Got to admit, the company has b*lls for giving out M$ software at a Linux Conference.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Test based configuration isn't the only choice. You can also use webmin, which is a Web based configuration tool that lets you configure many system components (sendmail, bind, samba, ... and also apache) using a user-friendly browser frontend
Granted, $1000 is pretty expensive for it, but a lot of the threads in here have been talking about why not just use php or whatever instead... I guess they miss the one big reason why ASP is popular with companies (especially small ones):
Its easy!
I mean really... lets say your person X who has to build a website for your small company. Your not a programmer at all, have very little experience with scripting languages, and in general aren't all that technical.
You look at some sample perl code, and your mind baffles.
You look at some sample asp code, and assuming they used vbscript (which like 90% of asp programmers do, but the choice is nice), its actually readable, even if you don't know what it does. Vbscript is very nonthreatening to a newbie user, because it bears at least a passing resemblance to english itself.
So, what are you going to go with?
Then later you decide you want to add a small databse to this small company site. Well, low and behold, you whip up what you want in MS Access, stick it on the server, and follow some very basic and easy to follow instructions at any ASP help site. Presto, you now have an online database which can serve a small company pretty well.
Then lets say in a couple months thats kind of overloaded... you add an MS SQL server in. You change your DSN around to point to the SQL Server, and if your adding dates into your database, change the delimiter. Done, the script now uses the SQL Server instead of the Access DB (ADO/ODBC are great for that).
Do you see where I'm going with this? Its significantly easier for someone who doesn't actually want to spend hours and hours dedicating themselves to learning how to do it to use ASP. Thats the market MS wanted to go after, and they did an excellent job of it.
If somebody can bring that definate ease of use advantage (and don't tell me its not there, I just went through this a couple months ago personally and I know for a fact its true) to Linux, thats great. Now if only they could do it for less then $1000, but maybe this acquision will lower the price somewhat?
So come on guys, don't rag on it because its an MS technology, they actually did a very good job of making it pretty painless to get a scripted site up and running.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
nothing to see here, except to say that its kinda sucky hehehe.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
VB - 60%
TSQL/PL-SQL/Informix 4GL - 15%
C++ - 15%
C - 5%
Java - 5%
Perl - ~0%
Fortran - ~0%
68K assembler - ~0%
Why? Because this is what my employers pay me to write. And why do they pay me to write VB? Because (with a few exceptions) I can build the same functionality in VB about twice as fast as in C++ and at very little cost in terms of performance.
As all the 3733T Linux gods out there will find once they leave school, those of us making a living in the Real World end up doing what the client pays for because otherwise we don't eat. Comprende?
BTW - one great advantage of VB which no-one's mentioned here yet is that it's possible (with a bit of lateral thinking) to come up with far filthier hacks than are available in most any other language
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
It's great if you're able to buy fully into the whole ColdFusion lifestyle, but if you need to step outside the bounds Allaire set - even for an instant - you're SOL.
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
actually i'm only 5. my mom says i'm really smart.
here
looks to me like Cobalt is making a concerted effort to offer an Intranet-in-a-box. Their Qube server pre-loaded with chili!Soft would provide a nice solution for a company looking to produce an internal site for information dissemination. You may not like ASP personally, but the fact remains that it is a really easy technology to work with and it lets non-programmers or novice programmers create dynamic pages with very little effort.
Economics dictates that if this practice were not profitable, these types of deals would cease to occur. Companies buy other companies for all sorts of reasons; I suspect that Cobalt wanted the inside track on getting ASP on Linux servers. In buying Chili!Soft, Cobalt gets access not only the code, but to the developers who envisioned an implemented the product.
See this is the whole problem.
ASP is nothing without those tools and the whole platform.
If you wanna support ASP, people are gonna ask for FP/InterDev support as well; and by then you're locked to MS' protocols (and we know what happens then).
Mind you I work for solutions.
I convinced my bosses that I could have their solution ready by the time it would take to have their NT machines rebooted for the 10th time (ie. installed the software).
Ok not all true but almost.
ASP is only good for very shortterm solutions, like guestbooks. I would never use it though.
Big solutions get very bloated very fast in ASP.
Not to mention impossible to extend.
Sure blame the developers, but you know that's the people that thinks ASP is the solution for everything. And that's the people that buy it.
And that's the people that show that ASP = VB.
While I continusly update and improve that site our IT-department raises projects of major proportions when they realize that they need this kind of site for the whole business.
I *know* that they will finally ask us how we did it, simply because we have a working solution that we *can* extend.
Too bad someone managed to unplug the machine by mistake, the 300+ day uptime got lost.
No, it's not one line of PHP, it's made with Roxen.
Go on do your "productive solutions for clients",
I do mine for servers and even MS has realized that's where the data is going to be.
Sadly, asp2php fails miserably for complicated asp. Even when it works, the php it generates isn't highly maintainable. :(
-- rage, rage against the dying of the light
From about Oct-Dec I worked at Chili!Soft. it's on the first floor of a sad little office complex in Bellevue/WA. Upstairs is Drugstore.com and in the building across is SGI, or at least some part of it.
The only food for 2 miles is a little deli in the building across the way., the place is literally the size of my bedroom and constantly has huge lines. But the food is good.
Oh also there was a service called "Roma Deli" (or something like that) that would stop by everyday around 12pm, all it was is this hot 20 something chick with a ice-cooler. The sandwiches we're overpriced and usually under par. Also the marketing guys would constantly hit on her.
I only worked there for about 2 months because the project I was under was this "rebel group" the CTO (and founder) was putting together. After about 5 weeks we find out he's leaving, apparently the CEO thought we're weren't getting any VC money because of him. And our most of group gets laid off.
This really blew for two new hires that just came on, one from Canada who left his family for the job, not to mention a gig with Coral. It didn't matter for me, for one I hated my job, and second I was on contract.
The IT "group" is this 20 something linux guy. There are some VERY smart people there. At one time we had a "brain puzzle" thing on the white board. Questions that really kill people at interviews, these guys got it FAST. Very smart.
The sad thing is the management just blew. I remember the first company meeting. Basically the CEO said, "ok, we have lots of money, but we need to start making some if we want some more.. so what we're going to do is become a "solutions provider, really give added-value benefit to the ISP virtual market, etc.. etc...". the next meeting it was more like. "ok, we have about enough money for another month. So what we're going to do is push for the linux ASP and try to get some "channel partners" with redhat and other distros".
I don't know what happened after that. But it seemed like a bunch of people we're jumping ship, the moral was pretty low. it seems like it's a good example of bad management killing good ideas and talent.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Well that depends on how you want to play with the numbers J
..
According to netcraft the
"Web Server Usage Ranked by Percentage of Top 100 Shopping Sites" you get.
IIS/ASP = 52%
Netscape = 22%
Apache = 21%
Other = 5%.
got this out of the last MicroNews, Microsoft's internal rag.
this is my sig.
True, but realize Chili!Soft ASP is for businesses, specifically the price tag is for ISP's. companies that blow that much for Solaris brand RAM. Or Windows Proxy Server (so not worth it)
It's not for linux hobbyists. Maybe with this buyout things will change. I hope they do.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Is a good thing. However, its very pricey, especially coming from a GNU/Linux/BSD background where the norm is 'apps for free, pay for support'..
Has anyone considered starting a free implementation? Are there licensing concerns with ASP? I cant imagine it would be too hard, considering we already have ASP->PHP, so the standard is probably well understood..
How hard would it be to create a 'wrapper' of sorts, which would run ASP stuff on PHP?
This is the problem with closed stuff on free OSs. If it is worth doing, someone will do it for free sooner or later, rendering your product worthless... Check VMware in a couple of years once FreeMWare (or whatever they are called now) have comparable functionality. I wouldnt be buying shares anytime soon....
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
I would assume the word chili comes from chile, which is spanish for peppers (does anybody knows?)
Orlando
PHP rulez :)
Paul
IMO, ASP is most useful, for allowing you to write all your dynamic-type code server-side so you can have your web server spit out nothing but browser-neutral HTML to your users. I write everything out to the HTML 3.2 standard which lets you completly ignore browser issues as long as you have alt tags for your images and such.
Ironically enough, ASP - a technology developed by the Evil Empire, is useful for specifically avoiding the browser wars as much as possible. I don't WANT my users downloading dynamic recordsets they can manipulate on the client - cause I don't know what browser they're using... ASP is the glue that lets me do everything server-side and ignore the browser wars.
Course, the downside is that I use server resources where I could use client resources, that things that could be done locally require additional trips to the server. But the payout at not having to build and maintain multiple coppies of the site seems worth it to me unless you have major bandwidth issues.
What I don't get is why ChiliSoft for Linux would be a good thing. I looked at the product (not for Linux) a couple years ago when management at my old job was making threattening noises about changing our web server software from IIS (and it wasn't like they wanted a GOOD web server like Apache either, they were looking at crap like Domino - which would mean still running on the blue-screen-of-death OS).
ChiliSoft appears to be a cool little product if you have a bunch of functionality dependent on ASP that you want to hang on to - install their little app and your ASP's run fine on platforms other than NT/IIS.
BUT... that was before I heard of PHP. I haven't used it just yet, but I read the HOWTO docs a while back and the thing is cool and does way more than ASP. And while PHP does run on various platforms, far as I can tell, it was built mostly as a Linux answer to ASP.
And while it wouldn't run your ASP's correctly, there's a conversion programs that converts your ASP pages to PHP easily enough.
Is there anyone here who has actually used both products as opposed to just reviewing them like I have?
Is there a reason to prefer the Chili! product over PHP? What are they actually like to implement and use?
Has anyone actually converted current NT/IIS/ASP web sites to either PHP or ChiliSoft?
FrontPage isn't actually compatible with ASP. If you open an ASP page in FrontPage, it deletes everything it doesn't like.
You can develop in one direction only... marketing folks do design and layout in FP, then someone programs the scripts in VI or in a text editor or whatever. But if you go back and open the finished product in FP, it ruins it.
Most of what end users are going to make with FrontPage use the FrontPage server extensions (MS calls them "web bots"), not the ASP dll (or any other IIS bits). Heck, even doing include files in FrontPage uses a "web bot" as opposed to the standard server side include processor of the web server software.
The FrontPage server extensions are a buggy piece of crap. However, they've been around for Apache since back when FrontPage was in beta, back before there WAS any such thing as IIS or ASP. You absolutely can offer full FrontPage functionality on an Apache server - always could.
So you CAN offer FrontPage functionality on Linux without ChiliSoft or PHP or whatever. It is just the ASP-specific stuff you can't offer.
And let me offer this... I can not imagine WHY I'd want to let someone who needs FrontPage to write a frigging web page write server-side scripts! I mean, REALLY! It's like giving a loaded gun to a child.
By definition, anything put together by a novice in an afternoon would not be professional. Professional code should documented and maintainable, handle errors and weird input in some fashion other than choking and/or providing security holes and should have at least some thought towards performance.
This is just not true of many working environments. I am a professional programmer and analyst, I am not a novice. I use VB because the time it takes to create a basic front end is sooo much faster than anything else. Being professional is about choosing the right tools for the right purpuse and spending the appropriate amount of time on the right things. In most offices VB is the right tool.
However, that point aside I must agree with you regarding the comparison with PHP and ColdFusion. Although I was familiar with VB beforehand I still found PHP a damn site easier and faster and nicer to code in than VBScript which does virtually nothing out of the box. I dream of the day everyone uses PHP.
Well yeah you're correct you can use php etc. as your active server pages
.oO0Oo.
I'm no novice I've been developing on the Windows platform since 3.1. The only way to get to the features of the OS is by using VBScript. And then you discover that the features of the OS weren't really worth it.
For the last two years I've worked in a mixed OS environment at an ISP. Maintaining an NT box for multiple customers can be a real headache. Big time. Keeping all of your configuration in one big unreadable binary file is great while you're using the GUI. Until disaster happens. We had 950 web sites on one IIS box. One day after one of the regular reboots Microsoft Management Console decided it didn't want to read the config and no web sites were running. It's 4pm on a Friday. Nine hours later we had laboriously reconfigured the box. We were lucky we kept a separate database of what each customer had.
Plus the asp.dll regularly crashes too. No scripted web pages work and no error is reported anywhere just blank pages. Cure: reboot.
I would say that Apache on *Nix is a much better bet. Text file configuration is superior because you can use other text as an example of what you need to put. The net has so much information for *Nix configuration and administration esp. for Linux. The culture of openness means that when you're stuck the chance is that somebody else was too and there's probably a mini-howto somewhere.
And because everything is there at the start - cgi/perl/c/c++/python/php + many more you can experiment as you learn. Wanna try Perl on your IIS box - get installing and rebooting.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is a particular feature I would like to very much see sorted out.
.oO0Oo.
A lovely IDE for php on X would be a godsend.
I'll pop it on me todo list!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The crack's worn off. Yeah I agree, what I said was rubbish. The scripting host system allows just the same flexibility as VB Script. I should only post in the afternoon!
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Okay all of this company buying just bothers the sh!t out of me. Okay.. If they were interested in the implementation I think if they threw some of that IPO cash at Chilli Soft they could have easily bought all the source and had rights to create their own version or pay Chilli to just develop it for them even.
Why snarf the entire company if you just need it for your applications.
I *CAN* understand but do you need that much steering and does the price advantage ever work out buying another company versus just paying them to develop software for you? Hmmn, I dont get it but at anyrate I hope this was not a wasteful move on Cobalt's part.
Jeremy
With comments like these I wonder why I even
bother working on asp2php anymore...
-Mike
http://home.i1.net/~naken/
VB's sedimentary feature accumulation has destroyed its potential for soundness and beauty; the language is a mess.
VB never had any potential for soundness or beauty. If you decide to build a motorcycle, and you start with a bathtub, no good will ever come of it. Of course, they've made it much, much worse than it ever had to be -- you've got that right! But I don't agree that it could ever, under any circumstances, been anything but a momentarily interesting toy. It ain't Delphi.
I believe that the only serious obstacle to Python becoming cross-platform-VB-done-right is its lack of a refined IDE
I agree. People should probably start emailing Borland while Kylix is still in flux. They should be going for something like pluggable any-damn-language-you-like instead of just Pascal'n'C++. That could be a very Good Thing.
The problem is that even Python with a Delphish IDE would never be that much of a selling point to the VB crowd, because they're afraid of anything but VB. They simply refuse to learn other languages. The abysmal anthropoid cretinism of their attitude is obvious to you and me, but not to them and they're the ones who are keep MS on top of the industry. You should also take a brief moment to conteplate the sheer howling horror of trying to explain Python's indenting to a VB "programmer". Half of them left-justify all their code. I don't think more than one out of ten has the intellect necessary to understand that feature of Python. In practice, they'd get bizarre and unexplained (to them, I mean) behavior from their code, and get more and more angry, and ultimately beat the computer to death with a rock. You're drastically overestimating the intelligence of VB idiots if you think they are even capable of learning a useful programming language. They're not.
A professional programmer is more likely to write code which has been planned out and written with reliability and ease of maintainance than a novice. They're also a lot more likely to understand things like testing input bounds, error handling and the like (ever break a website by entering a ' in a field?).
There's also considerable debate over just how easy ASP is. I've heard marketing types claim that but have never seen any justification for it. It's only easier if you already know VB and have Windows development experience with COM. Most of the people I know who've used both would consider ColdFusion much easier to start with, particularly if you have an HTML background. A coworker of mine mentioned that one of the web development classes he'd taken was supposed to cover both ColdFusion and ASP; by the end of the first week ASP was dropped by unanimous consent as everyone thought it was much harder and couldn't see a reason to use it. I've heard numerous similar comments about PHP vs ASP. VBscript is a mess and both JScript and VBScript are feature-poor languages. Does anyone want to spend time fighting their environment instead of building their application?
Ever try to send an email? It's one simple command in PHP or ColdFusion. It's several lines of ASP, assuming you have CDONTS or similar installed in the first place. Want to handle an uploaded file in a form? Very simple in PHP or ColdFusion, very complicated and non-intuitive in ASP. (No, I don't consider evaluating, purchasing, installing and using a 3rd-party COM object intuitive, particularly for a novice.)
Don't forget the documentation you'll need isn't in one place, either - there are separate sections for VBScript/JScript, ADO, CDONTS and everything else. A depressingly high percentage of the examples in Microsoft's documentation are just plain wrong to boot. How are newbies supposed to know where to find the documentation they need, much less judge whether it is correct? Note that neither of the common tasks I mentioned above is covered anywhere a novice ASP user would know to check, so they'll have to hope it's covered in a book or spend some time searching the web. In contrast, someone with a text editor and either www.php.net or the Cold Fusion docs would be able to develop page using only that information.
Yes, ASP is infinitely extendible. So is Excel for that matter. In both cases you VBscript can call methods of COM objects that can be written in C++ and can therefore do pretty much anything you want.
It's a good scripting model, live with it. In fact, I can write a COM object in Perl and call its methods from ASP. Fun fun fun.
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Here is a page which lists the various platforms supported by Chili!Soft ASP
And this is what it does.
Sounds pretty hoopy. Let's hope Cobalt do decide to give back to the community that's put them where they are now and open-source it.
Politas
Well, as of FrontPage 2000, the protocol being used is (supposed to be) WebDAV, which is open. Also, my favourite editor, Scite (http://www.scintilla.org/) has a lot of support for ASP, in highlighting. So you could probably hack together a mixture of scite and sitecopy to clone Interdev.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Very true, although apache+php offers more or less the same solution as <insert webserver> + ASP.
At the end of the day, competing with Microsoft means providing Visual Basic, or something so much like it that the end user can't tell the difference. Productivity counts. They want to be able to knock together something professional in an afternoon without being overly technical, and ASP -- again, whether you like it or not -- lets them do that. If we can offer fully-functional ASP and IIS on Linux, we can start to clean up the last pockets of resistance.
PERL/Tk = Visual Basic
PHP = ASP
Those are my thoughts on that matter. Configuring linux boxen *is* easy. It used to be not so, but really, it's just a matter of
./configure
make
make install
nowadays. It's just not that hard anymore.
All that being said, I am in favor of ASP for linux because choice is a Good Thing.
http://gabrielcain.com/
It just means that more people will be able to move their Active Server Pages based sites off of the micros~1 platform when they next have a problem.
Slightly off topic, I suppose, but does anyone know of a good ODBC client for Linux? I visited FreshMeat a month or so ago and found OdbcSocketServer, which does work, but seems to fall apart when used with larger databases. That is, if I want to update one or two records, it works great, but if I want to suck down an entire SQL Server database, it doesn't work right.
The application, if you're curious, is to integrate a Windows-based accounting program with a mySQL-based e-commerce site.
I'd like to hear reviews before I start using a commercial product, and it looks like that's what most of the other drivers are. So does anyone have experience with ODBC clients under Linux, and which one would you recommend? Ideally, it would have a similar API to mySQL, since I'm so used to that.
Many thanks for any thoughts.
D
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If Cobalt keeps ChiliSoft's software proprietary and makes it available only with their own products, that limits the overall availability of that kind of software. It would have been better for ChiliSoft to remain a separate company and sell their product to anybody using Linux.
If Cobalt open sources or keeps selling ChiliSoft's ASP software to others, it's altogether good. That would make it easier for more people to move to Linux from Windows. If open sourced, people could also implement the ASP features that are missing from the product themselves.
I hope the latter will happen, and I think it would be in the interest of Cobalt anyway. Anybody who is going to deploy a large web site based on ASP is going to need something like Cobalt hardware. By growing the market, they can grow their own revenues.
Of course, in the big scheme of things, ASP is not all that great (neither are JSP or similar approaches to dynamic page generation). So, in the long run, I hope this sort of software will just go away completely.
I admit ASP for Linux would be cool, but only if it were FREE! I mean, that's one of the big considerations when thinking seriously about a Linux solution in a business.
I went to the Chili!Soft home page and was dismayed to find a hefty $1000 pricetag on the technology (you can get it for half off right now, for Linux -- still pricey).
Well, a license for NT Server is about that price these days, and you get IIS at no cost with that license. That includes the bona-fide ASP capabilities.
So what's so great about Chili!Soft ASP?
I mean, look what you can get for Linux instead of ASP:
PHP3
PHP4
Emb_perl
Mason (my fave!)
Not to mention good ol' CGI and some mod_perl.
These don't cost a dime and give you all the functionality of ASP.
Chili!Soft's main claim is that, with their ASP, you can use MS dev tools to develop web sites on multiple platforms. I say pbthbthbthhthbthb to that. Is that worth a grand?
I saw a bunch of people complaining that companies like redhat, cobalt and VA are using this IPO money to buy up companies left and right. Think about it like this:
1) I would rather strong standing linux fromthe start companies buy these guys up instead of some Microsoft wannabe (only in business practice and ethics).
2) They are just trying to supplement thier income and help turn a profit like any other business. The opensource software business model has NOT had a chance to prove itself. At least this way there is a guaranteed source of income for these companies in these commercial offerings.
3) It's a value added resource. Not a power pack with time restricted digital audio and a few themes).
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I have to develop sites for ASP on NT. I would love to see an InterDev-type editor -- i.e., one that does syntax highlighting for ASP and talks to the frontrage extensions for publishing -- for Linux. Any such beast? Anyone know how the FP 'protocol' works?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Speaking about the features of Chili ASP:
Based on Microsoft's Active Server Pages technology, the de facto standard for Web applications .
That's an odd statement. Isn't Perl/CGI used much more prevalently than ASP ?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Not that anyone does, but you can build COM objects on Unix . . .look here
If not there is always asp2php http://asp2php.naken.cc/ .
you must be knew here.
remember, this is slashdot. he must be GNU here.
If we can offer fully-functional ASP and IIS on Linux, we can start to clean up the last pockets of resistance.
And while whe're at it, why stop at full functionality? Why stop at reimplementing micros~1 applications and not use their tactics? Why not embrace & extend our GPLled versions and put in some nice new features?
If the extensions are any good, micros~1 will be forced to implement them...
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
ASP (not to mention IIS) for Linux is important. It's all very well to hold the volume hosting market, but we need to get into the small companies that keep a web server in the closet and don't have a full-time sysadmin. That's where NT is holding their 24% (or whatever) of the market, and the only way we can go after them there is to provide the same features with greater reliability.
At the end of the day, competing with Microsoft means providing Visual Basic, or something so much like it that the end user can't tell the difference. Productivity counts. They want to be able to knock together something professional in an afternoon without being overly technical, and ASP -- again, whether you like it or not -- lets them do that. If we can offer fully-functional ASP and IIS on Linux, we can start to clean up the last pockets of resistance.
PHP's swell and all, but there aren't any IDEs for it, never mind slick, drag-and-drop RAD tools like Drumbeat 2000.
And PHP3 is still woefully two-tier. Where are the fully-supported APIs for talking to transaction servers or CORBA and COM objects? And why write your core logic in a language different from your outer layer, as you end up doing with PHP? At least with ASP you can leverage VB skills one a few layers.
Even JSP (which is especially nifty at the 3-tier game) has RAD tools bublling up. There's the JSP version of Drumbeat and IBM's WebSphere Studio. AFAIK, both only generate code certified for WebSphere, but that's more than there is for PHP.
Cobalt made a really smart move. Chilisoft just came out of beta with the ASP for linux days ago. I was one of the beta testers and it really is a nice product. ASP is one of the things that I have been looking for for a long time under linux because I have several web users who only know frontpage HTML (or non-HTML as the case may be) and it was really a pain for me to tell them I didn't support ASP. Now I just need to order my copy (Not a cheap product for the average user but well within reason of any company.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
http://www.cobalt.com/about/pres s/2000/000323.html
I was an Systems Engineer for a Cobalt reseller for about a year. I no longer work for the reseller, but have still been a fan of the products. After quitting my old job, I have actively been helping people out on the Cobalt users list, and still admin some Cobalt servers. I've been one of their strongest supporters... until they started getting into this whole Chilisoft ASP business
A couple of months back they announced that they would be offering support for the Chilisoft ASP product, I got pretty upset about the whole deal. To follow the thread, click here
Basically my argument is that there is an excellent opensource project called PHP that pretty much does everything that ASP can do (and in most cases does it better, easier, etc.) that they are largely ignoring. They don't even offer a supported installation of PHP on their equipment. Its classified as 'experimental'. So rather than contribute developers to PHP and support the project, or even support it, they are going with a third party hack of a hack by Microsoft! What gives!?
I realize that Cobalt gear is targeted to companies currently deploying Microsoft technologies. But to skip over a very popular and worthy open-source solution in favor of a closed-source solution that is helping M$ technology market and mind share is an insult to the community their products are based upon.
So the only way for me to continue support Cobalt's products and their users, Cobalt will have to:
- Open Source the Chilisoft ASP Package
- Offer PHP *supported* & *out of the box*
If it doesn't happen, I'm going to no longer be a Cobalt advocate. I'd rather spend my money with a company like VA Linux that is actively promoting and giving back to the Open Source community. Hell, some could argue that even Sun has contributed more back to the community.-kris
Incidently, I did an informal survey not to long ago and lost the actual results, but I figured about 25-30% of Cobalt customers are using PHP on their machines currently in its 'unsupported' state. Imagine the penetration if they offered a supported out-of-the box solution? It would be a great boost to the PHP install & user base.
I think this is an extremely smart move, especially considering the large number of current ASP users/developers. It's just not realistic to ask a small company to retrain all of its developers from VB/InterDev/ASP to PHP. The costs of doing that would far outweigh the return on investment for switching to Linux in most cases.
If I were Cobalt, I'd start bundling two more things: a high performance JSP/Servlet implementation and management interface (Resin + a web front end), and a serious database. MySQL is nice if you're writing code from the ground up that can work around its lack of SQL standards compliance and other features, but it can be difficult to port code from other DBs to it. Once InterBase 6.0 is out for real, Cobalt will have a full presentation(ASP/JSP) and backend (InterBase) solution with near-zero administration (IB was made for exactly this sort of use).
I think that sounds like a pretty damn cool solution-in-a-box, much more sophisticated and maintainable than the current server appliances.
--JRZ
Is Here