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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."
- 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 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.
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
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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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
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/
As to the justification for doing it I would have thought the large number of BSD servers would be good enough reason.
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
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.
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"
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.
And Schumacher will continue to win until Max Mosley decides that letting Schumacher and Ferrari cheat isn't the best way to get higher TV revenues.
- 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
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.