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Chili!Soft ASP Port to FreeBSD?
An unnamed reader writes "Daily DaemonNews is running a story about Chili!Soft doing a port of Chili!Soft ASP to FreeBSD. It seems they're trying to gather enough interest to make a port worth while. A phone number and link is mentioned in the article."
You should really go with JSP. Then you can develop on a free implementation and deploy on a supported commercial platform.
- It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.
However, as The Jargon File points out, ASP just seems like a language with candygrammar:- "[...] The usual intent of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that costs. Thus the invariable result is that `candygrammar' languages are just as difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced hacker."
So, as noted there, easier syntax doesn't automagically make a language easier to use.Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Posted by SchumacherWinsAgain:
PHP = Schumacher
ASP = Hakkinen
Winner, Hero, Schumacher!
Posted by njspencer:
Very simple.
Want the power and scalability of Unix Platform, and don't want to totally rewrite you current software base.
It is a very compeling business case. Also you have to go with what your developers know. Once again you could retrain, but that costs. The one time cost is far less than training.
Yes, if you wish to write from ground zero you would use Perl/PHP or another language. But, the purpose is porting.
On the other hand a more complicated syntax doesn't make it any easier to program in either, as Perl has shown us.
:-)
Yay Python.
-Dom
The most complete is a commercial package from Halcyon Software, called Instant ASP. There's a comparison between iASP and Chili!ASP on the site (hard to find just with their links). Since iASP is Java (servlet) based, it also makes a decent package to support migration from ASP to JSP.
There are also at least a couple free ASP tools that work fine on BSD: Apache::ASP (Perl only), and ASP2PHP, which supports a certain amount of automatic conversion from ASP VBscript pages to PHP.
Err.. if I remember correctly, ChilliASP is implemented in Java, so you would have the overhead of the VMs. Or is that Halcyon InstantASP?
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Sounds like a Slashdot story about some Linux application, three years ago. Quicken, anyone?
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"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Seeing as several of the large, full-service web hosting companies are doing more with the *BSDs, this makes enough sense. ASP support lets them reach a lot of would-be Windows hosting customers with a Unix-y solution that's easier and cheaper to offer than Win2K hosting. And it lets them offer customers something they can run UltraDev with without nearly as much system overhead as dozens of servlet/JSP engines on a virtual server box would need.
ASP is MUCH faster. I went through a few weeks conversions to take my ASP scripts to PHP as script based languages are much easier to maintain. I was shocked at the speed difference...and that was from a GUI intensive OS with EVERYTHING running to a CLI only OS with most of everything I didn't need removed.
Doh! Just wrote bunch of stuff disparaging PHP that I removed. All I'm going to say is that ASP seems more professional and I'm not talking designing from Interdev (heh! most of the time I'm programming from BBEdit on the Mac or Notepad).
Now if only I learned how to program those Java Serverlets without them being sooooooooo damn slow, I'd switch in a heart beat just so I didn't have to worry about platform dependance...
BTW not sure if its listed anywhere, but there is an ASP to PHP converter tool that was very helpful for learning PHP from my old codes...
clif
Maybe technically, but in reality most people mean the IIS/MS kind.
What? That didn't even make any sense. Did you even bother cracking that book open past Chapter 1: A Dynamic Web Page Saying "Hello, World!"? Please, just stop now.
Cheers,
The people who think that PHP is as powerful an environment as ASP (much less ASP.net) are the same people who can't figure out why people would use Oracle when MySQL is free.
Cheers,
Your post made it abundantly clear that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. What's this ASP language that you're talking about? Perlscript? Python?
Seriously, I'm just extremely curious why you'd even want to post on this subject when you don't understand it. Boredom? Masochism? The thrill of trolling?
Cheers,
Last time I checked, Chili's ASP for Linux was damn expensive. With all the *free* programming languages out there, why would anyone do ASP? Why not use PHP or Perl?
First there's the argument that PHP makes ASP unnecessary. While I agree in principle (and use PHP as my primary server side scripting solution), there's no question that ASP is here to stay because it is the cornerstone of the Microsoft Internet strategy. I would, therefore, urge people to consider that ASP for non-MS platforms is analagous to StarOffice being capable of using MS Office file formats: this is a great thing to help people migrate to *BSD if they want to, or to use *BSD as a backup to their Windows environment. For that reason alone, I'm very excited about this latest development. I don't expect there'll be any PHP people switching to ASP now 'though.
My second (and larger) concern is with Chili!Soft. Specifically I worry about the exclamation mark between the 'Chili' and the 'Soft. What's it doing there? Is it lost? Someone may want to ask Chili!Soft why they don't see other companies with similar punctuational conventions. Where are the Slash?Dots, or the Mac@Words, or the Linux&Cares? Nowhere. Why? Because it's stupid and impossible to pronounce punctuation as a conjunction between two words. Are we to understand that the Chili is vigorous and exciting, the the soft is ah, just soft? Could be Chili!Hard, or Chili!Bowl, they don't care.
Truth be told, I don't really care. I just think it's amazing the lengths people will go to generate a distinct brand (either that or the lengths they will go to avoid admitting to a typo).
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I know I'm being judgemental, but if someone wants to ensure that I take no interest in their product, all they have to do is include exclamation points in the name.
This seems like an interesting story and all, but the editors aren't putting similar, good topics like the non-inclusion of SGI's Apache speed patches (due to the size of the patches and patent problems) on the front page. That one definitely could use a Slashdot mention to get the community together and work on overcoming the obstacles to getting them committed. Faster Apache is more important to me than ASP support in Unix.
Chances are the ISP, if smart, doesn't allow the customer to run all kinds of third-party COM components.
If they want to run their own custom or third-party components, they had better have their own colo. Otherwise, you run into administration and possibly licensing nightmares...(say the customer purchases a component for one site only, they're vhosted on a server with 100 sites, and they want you to register this component...what's stopping another user from instantiating the component?)
Oh boy! Just what I've always wanted! A chance to increase the worlds dependence on M$ shit. At least make it ASP 3.x compatible. Personally, I'll use PHP all day long over that crap ASP. I don't care that I can use my scripting language of choice for ASP, it's still a proprietary piece of shit, created to run VBScript. Pure drivel.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
The main reason we looked at using Chilisoft is because some of our non programming literate HTML guys used some tool that generated ASP code. This prepackaged tool generated a testing application, that the higher ups demanded, and did so with little to no coding. Believe me, it was not my decision to have them use this tool, and if it was my decision, we would have developed this in house, because these guys no NOTHING about creating a multi user web application. THEY WERE GOING TO USE MS ACCESS FILES AS THEIR DATABASE FOR A MULTI USER HIGH PROFILE WEB APPLICATION ---AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH--- But I'll get to the point.
While Chilisoft ASP is rather expensive, it is still less expensive than a high end NT server. For a lot less money and pain, we can put Chilisoft on our Sun cluster which has plenty of power already, and continue using (IMHO) the much more stable Solaris platform. So far, on our development server, it has seemd to provide us with very nice speed, plus I was easily able to configure ODBC connections to Oracle, and force the HTML guys to stop using Acess. Plus, we've got this application running on Chilisoft on a loaded down development Solaris box (to test it out), and so far, we've seen amazing performance out of it. We're seeing performance that NT zealots around here are amazed by.
MacOS X is not in any way binary compatible with FreeBSD. Why ? because it is not FreeBSD and it does not even run on intel processor (or FreeBSD does not run on PowerPC).
Sorry about that but I think your comment is void.
Hub
SunOS 4.x and below is BSD. But Solaris aka SunOS 5.x is System V, not BSD.
BTW all of this stuff is not about the technical difficulties of porting a UNIX software to another UNIX system, but on commercial availability of binary-only software with commercial support that come with. Even if the port is trivial, offering to sale such a version cost money. More than you think.
Hub
You know, I've wondered this myself. I went looking on Chilisoft's site and found: "VBScript and JavaScript scripting languages" quote. No mention of using Perl or another WSH language....
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Actually, I just realized I probably should have put this in Vb syntax ASP (VBScript) ...
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Ahh, only to be nailed by the thing that kills the greater than and less than signs... SIGH.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
just FYI, lots of people here are using ASP when they seem to mean VBScript. The Windows Scripting Host can use a whole lot of scripting languages. Lots of folks use Jscript or even Perl.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
(Since your post is just a verbatim copy of one you've written elsewhere on this thread, I'll duplicate my reply...)
But porting a customer's website to Chili!Soft isn't just a case of copying over the VBScript: chances are their site will be utilising third-party COM components which aren't available under Linux.
(I don't mean that COM components in general aren't available, just that the particular COM components already in use by the customer probably aren't).
-Andy
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http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
Just saw your other reply.
:-)
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http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
It may "do COM", but my point is that you'll have to roll your own. You won't be able to use any of the (many, many) currently available COM components from the win32 world - which, I assert, are what make ASP tolerable in the first place.
-Andy
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http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
I've used Chili!Soft ASP on Linux and whilst it works, I'll be very happy not to ever use it again. Here's why.
The reason ASP is a winner in the win32 world is the availability of third-party COM components to do all the heavy lifting. The ASP "developer" generally just writes VBScript to hook this stuff together. More advanced developers might write their own components, but the reason it's so popular is that you don't have to.
This isn't the case under Linux, with Chili!Soft ASP... The third-party components aren't there (no binary compatability between platforms), so all your logic has to be done in your scripting language, eg VBScript - which soon ceases to be fun. You can write your own components but it's decidedly non-trivial, much more so than in the win32 world where the tools for doing so are well developed.
I'll stick to Python I think. And especially Zope.
-Andy
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http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
VBScript is licensed from MS, COM stuff is from WINE i belive, or maybe that company that makes that win32 layer for *nix.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
WSH is a "host" of Active Sctipting.. but anyway..
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
Well, ISP's which need to host peoples ASP pages and dont want to do it on NT would find this usefull. There are MANY people which would find this helpful, since telling a client to recode their "wonderful" ASP website to PHP or ASP/perl is NOT usually an option. I personally prefer PHP, but this isnt an ideal world.
ahaha, and if your an ISP that wants to serve customer pages on FreeBSD? Do I tell the majority to recode their pages to PHP ?
ya, good point thing is, migrating 300 sites and trying to get people to pay is not easy. Some people are just stubborn and think ASP is the best thing ever. Customers also edit their webpages and I could imagine the # of calls because they cant figure out why their edited code isnt working. heh, in an idea world ppl would only use a nice open source scripting language. I cant say chili is all that great since it costs alot of $ and as someone pointed out wont work with 3rd party COM components. BUT, for any ASP page that dosnt use them it makes life alot easier
Well, any free solution would be preferable to the cost of chili :P
I have not actually used either solution yet so cant really say which would work better. but based on chili's features, it would be nicer, since running asp2php on the fly could be potentially slower.
I've seen deparments and universities move to Chilisoft (and eat the cost). Why? Can somebody explain to me why you'd choose it over PHP/mod_perl or whatever? Does it have a kick-ass IDE? Just curious.
Moron alert!
Just because something has an initial purchase cost of $0.00 does not on any way, shape or form imply that the "Total Cost of Owneership" is zero.
If you think that $0.00 purchase price means $0.00 TCO then I have some real estate that I'd like to sell you...
Wow.. we have a bright one here.. So your company can eat the cost of advanced server or whatever NT you use? Okay so you can afford a MS Server OS but cant afford a freeOS+ChilliSoft ASP? Brilliant... Jeremy
As to the justification for doing it I would have thought the large number of BSD servers would be good enough reason.
Basically, ASP is just a framework that provides session, request, and other objects to interact nicely with the server. Choose whatever language addresses your problem, and don't get hung up on VBScripts limitations.
is LSD or PCP involved?
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Je t'aime Stéphanie
Given the reliability level of MS servers, and the overall lack of security, I'd rather shove my mundane tasks to them, not vice-versa.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
I'd love to see a really good argument for using ASP. I have yet to see one except that one can keep using Windows boxes to do development. Of course, that's not really good logic.
If Macromedia would start to support PHP in Dreamweaver Ultradev, I'm sure lots of design houses that are looking at dynamic programming would use PHP instead.
(Of course, I'd like to see XHTML support as well!)
At any rate, in my job as a project manager I have never approved an ASP solution, and I don't think I ever will.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
ASP is fine on a microsoft platform but it's designed for a microsoft platform. As a full time ASP programmer, if my company decided to move to a unix platform I would go out and learn PHP. I have been playing with PHP since knowing both increases my marketablity. I think porting ASP to BSD might be chilis way of finding a niche market if microsoft does come through and put .net on linux.
as pointed out above, this isn't an ideal world, and if you're an ISP who likes to use BSD, and have clients who (for whatever reason, including cluelessness) have ASP sites they want you to host, this would beat either installing a seperate box with a different platform, telling them to rewrite their entire site or shop elsewhere.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
At least Office would have some takers. ASP seems to be almost ignored by the *NIX community for good reason.
Keep PHP and better that, don't waste time on ASP
DanH
Cavalry Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
It's so easy to write your Granny could do it.
Firms can hire vaguely technical people to write ASP that could never get their head round PERL or PHP.
Disclaimer: I'm not judging ASP, I'm pointing out why some people use it.
However, I think that an ASP port for UNIX should be completely free, opensource and so on.
So write it. This 'I think' stuff get none of us anywhere.
ps: Huzzah for Zope! ;)
2 1337 4 u!
I really don't understand what the reason to port ASP to *BSD (or Linux for that matter) is. Their is a decent, cross platform scripting language in the shape of PHP and the primary benefits of using ASP are only available for Win32 platforms.
.NET framework). This structure does allow you to develop more complex sites & puts it into competition with JSP / Servlets. Without the COM support it's just a scripting language framework, and VBScript doesn't really compare well to the other freely available scripting languages.
ASP on Win32 is pretty good in that it allows you to interface with the COM API's (and i'm assuming, been a while
Your example is a VBism. Under JScript you can do Session("aJSObject")=aJSObject. Can't say for PerlScript, but I imagine it's similar with perl hashes.
Besides, the IIS Session support is so slow that you wouldn't want to use it for any substantial amount of information. Generally it's only wise to put a UID in there and then have a header block that uses that UID to reconstitute your state objects (generally DB-backed). After about 500 users, apparently using ADO/MS-SQL is actually faster than getting info out of the IIS session object!
Besides, the WebLogic servlet container docs explicitly recommend against using their session object for storing anything but strings. Not to mention the fact that even though JSP is compiled, it's still slower at code execution than interpreted ASP. (But the programming functionality and more scalable platforms make up for that, in my book.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Geeks devoted to linux, *BSD, etc have traditionally not be intimidated by ease of use issues, at least when it comes to their choice of tools. They may like ease of use, but they want the tools to be solid, flexible, with minimim strings attached, etc. I would say that aside from any technical reasons to prefer ASP over other solutions, the Microsoft connection is going to be troubling to a lot of folks. Too many strings attached, philosophically and otherwise. That may be a killer on its own.
I do not know what the advantadges or disadvantadges are to ASP. The arguments of "ease of use" may be true, but I am skeptical of this on the basis of hidden costs, the gotchas that MS typically embeds as features into their products and protocols, but which look suspiciously like bugs. Anyone who has looked at their OSes can get a taste of that, and knows what that means.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
However, I think that an ASP port for UNIX should be completely free, opensource and so on.
The Free ASP port is now available at: ftp://ftp.CLUE.org/a.tar.gz
Chili Soft belongs to Sun.
Sun produces SunOs/Solaris which is BSD compliant.
So, besides recompiling ASP, what is actually making this port a difficult thing, or at least, worth performing the mentionned study?
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
"ASP is pretty poor" So you're suggesting COLD FUSION?! Are you on crack? ASP is a hundred times faster and more powerful than CF, in my opinion. Do you actually have valid complaints against the technology, or is this an anti-MS bias at work?
There is an alternative that is already available on FreeBSD (and Linux) that rarely gets mentioned, and that is ADP (Aolserver Dynamic Pages). This uses Aolserver, an open source, multithreaded, and very fast web server that has a built in tcl interpreter with a very rich set of functions. ADP pages embed tcl scripts directly in html. You can also write .tcl scripts that produce html for your pages.
I think the reason it is not so well known is because of the name (AOL?? Ugh!), and because tcl is not as popular as perl or python or whatever.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
It seems like ChiliSoft must be thinking of the new Mac OS. Otherwise, why bother with a port?
This naturally leads to the question of how many websites they think are hosted on Mac now and how many they expect to be hosted on Macs running OS X. I can't believe there would be a lot of sites hosted on Macs. Of course, I can't imagine there can be much call for ASP on any *nix flavor because PHP/Perl/Python etc. etc. are free and they can do the job better than ASP. So maybe any increase in market share is a good thing from ChiliSoft's point of view.
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"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
-- Stan Dunn
another option, another reason not to use 2000/nt server. an empty toy box is... well, a boat i guess, but i cannot imagine that a port from linux could be incredibly time consuming. cobalt would double their market immediately. they should also port it to solaris so that it can run on those nifty $1000.00 boxes. btw, where can one get cheap ram for those (x1/t1) boxes?
SunOS 5.x is actually a BSD/SysV hybrid. The SysV stuff theoretically makes it easier to port all the HP-UX/SCO/(name another unix) stuff to Solaris. Personally? I liked the BSD style.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This would be good, if php wasnt around for bsd.
Considering what PHP can do, you dont need ASP.
PHP is everything you would want with asp, and more. The best part is that its free.
TCO is $0. Asp is not, Cfm is not, php is.
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Also, it supports VBScript and JScript versions 5.5 (which ChiliASP does not), and can be localized. http://www.halcyonsoft.com/products/chooseproduct. asp
i'm sure the two people who will buy this product will be very pleased.
- Flexibility - ChiliASP does not support everything that ASP is capable of (Mainly because some of those things *require* native IIS.
- Stability - Stability you say? Yep! ChiliASP caused a lot of memory leaks on the Linux box. We constantly had to reboot it, and it never seemed to run quite right.
- Cost (2) - We discovered that some native features of ASP are not available in ChiliASP without spending even more money on add-ons.
So while I think that porting it to FreeBSD was only natural for ChiliASP as they want to support the most platforms possible, we probably won't be using it here. Currently we rely very heavily on Cold Fusion (which could be a whole topic on it's own) but someday I would love to go to PHP. ASP is great if you are on a properly configured NT platform, but if you are going to go open-source, go with a language designed for it, or at least one that is close (such as Cold Fusion).Random Musings
ASP is not very good with sessions, ASP+ is much better handling them.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
The Scripting Host will allow you to program your ASP in various languages of choice, including Perl and Python.
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Sometimes you are stuck on an NT server, and ASP is simply the best choice for such an environment.
I actually find PerlScript to be one of the more flexible and powerful scripting languages in this setting, as you can access the excellent ADO, various server components, with the added power of Perl's RE and filesystem handling and multiple built in (free) functions.
I've worked in Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP, Perl and C for CGI applications. All have their place, and although I prefer PHP, I'm glad ASP is coming to BSD. I just wish it was free. I have quite a few customers who approach me with ASP scripts, and I simply have to try and convert them into PHP (not as hard as it sounds - JScript is actually quite close to PHP in a lot of respects). There is a market for this, so as far as I'm concerned, good stuff...
:-)
At the end of the day, this is going to be touted more of a success for FreeBSD (more commercial apps) than it is for Chilli. I'll just hope that it won't have all the problems that ASP had on IIS the last time I tried it. IIS sucks, ASP rules.
This line intentionally left here to annoy you.
If I've heard right then Mac OS X will be running on a BSD kernel. That could mean that you have a lot of fanatical mac users out there wating for their Chili.
one thing i can tell you is you got to be free
Even if we like ASP or not, even if we prefer PHP, JSP or ColdFusion, I think the port isn't bad by itself. It is more software for UNIX systems, so that means *NIX operating systems are taken very seriously. Why should we "fight" against this? New software is a way of developing these systems.
However, I think that an ASP port for UNIX should be completely free, opensource and so on. As everybody knows, that allows programs to be of high quality and really tested (see this for examples of not-deeply-tested applications). Furthermore, it is possible that commercial and free versions of a system exist, each one with its own capabilities (for example, mySQL and other SQL based systems).
As a conclusion, I agree on the port, but there should be a free version (and soon if possible :) ).
Engage!