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ASP or JSP?
Fooknut asks: "I'm here, in the infant stages of development of a corporate website, and portal for my employer. I asked to build on JSP/servlets/EJB, so they setup a Win2k server with IIS 5 and JRun (allaire). Two weeks into the dev process they have a meeting with some managing "programmers" and the decision is made that JSP/Java was just a foolish thing to do, and that we should go with ASP. So here I am, chucking all of my hard work out of the window because someone "important" likes ASP better. Luckily I haven't written much code yet. These decisions are made by ASP lovers, people stuck in the MS rut, unwilling to try or hold a new skillset (I believe because they don't know how and don't want to know how to program anything else). Does it make business sense to put all your chips in the MS hat? Should a web dev co do one thing only, or should it embrace a variety of technology? So what are the advantages and disadvantages of JSP over ASP and vice-versa? Please don't post anti-MS comments, I really would like some serious comparisons."
I have been attached at the hip to all things microsoft for 5 years. Access, VB, sql server, etc etc. And accomplished a bunch of ad hoc work.
With MUCH difficulty, I have learned enough java to write servlets and database calls and server side java can now do much of what I would do in ms land with the power of java running on opensource servers with free database software on a cheap monthly host.
I will agree that down and dirty wins the business contest. But it also is really really stupid, just like all the management decisions that make down and dirty programming the rule of the day.
This battle is far from over. If you want the definition of easy, try php, not ASP. And java is actually quite easy, once you get past all the inane classpath issues.
While the corporate monkeys are all addicting themselves to mindless tech, there are a bunch of us learning how to do real work with slightly more clunky technology and actually enjoying it. It is going to be very fun to watch the slug fest in the following years. I have my own personal ideas of who might win the war, and it won't be the mindless ones.
Cause MS stresses ease of use over anything else. (Well, besides world domination :-). Seriously, It is incredibly easy to do relativity simple things with MS products, but if you want to do anything complicated that MS didn't write in explicitly, you are screwed.
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ASP is nice; I am a PHP man myself, but I recently had to look into ASP for a consulting gig. ASP has a coupla features I'd really like to see in PHP, but in the end of the day, I'd still pick PHP's versatility.
But anyways, back to ASP vs JSP: JSP sucks! there's no other way to put it: JSP is a hack on top of a kludge: it's ugly syntactically, it tries to fit a square peg (Java) into a round hole (server-side scripting) and it has nowhere the built-in functionality and features of either PHP or ASP.
Now, OTOH Java *servlets* (not JSP) rock! Session management, persistent objects, the ability to leverage Java's impressive APIs; it's the answer to any serious enterprise-level solution.
So, what to do? PHP4 is supposed to be able to manipulate Java objects *directly* (it's in the spec but I haven't used it). If that works, you can now throw away JSP, put all your middleware logic in Java beans and servlets and use PHP to do the string-parsing and HTML pushing...
If I were you, I'd try to push for PHP as a 'peer to' ASP with the advantage of being able to use your old Java work...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.