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."

Comments

Re:Why people like ASP

[abischof]

• 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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Expensive software

[toofast]

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?

ASP != VBScript

[Pfhreakaz0id]

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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No point without COM

[gimbo]

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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Re:No point without COM

[tshak]

It's not entirely true that ASP is useless without COM.

Yes, you can do if-then logic... even do-while as well! (Okay, I'll be fair). You can't do:
HTTP Get's/Put's/Post's
Basic TCP/IP (FTP/Telnet/POP3/SMTPetc.)
Encryption (Hashing or otherwise, unless you want to write your own functions)
File Uploads
File I/O (FileSystemObject is a COM)
DB Connectivity (ADODB)

Plus, you can't connect to EJB's, CORBA ORB's, and it uses VBScript syntax (YUCK!). Personally, every piece of ASP code I've seen is a mess... even if it's written REALLY well, it's hard to maintain. I hate the fact that I have to connect to a COM to do anything. If I need a _simple_ language, I'll use something more intuative like Cold Fusion (Sorry, conn=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") is not as intuative as CFQUERY, nor is using a ( ' ) as a comment mark). If I need a powerful and more verbose language, I'll use JSP or PHP.

To be fair, ASP does run faster than JSP/PHP/CF (at least on windows) and seems to be more stable.

ChiliASP and Others...

[Anml4ixoye]

We use ChiliASP here because one of our outside agencies had their site developed by an outside vendor who did the whole thing in ASP. The conversion has been an absolute nightmare. ChiliASP is great for those hardcore ASP developers who need to keep programming because they can't (or won't) switch to PHP or CF but want the stability of a non-NT platform. BUT...There are quite a few drawbacks to it. The first noted was cost. We initially looked at running it on a Solaris box but the cost was absolutely prohibitive. When then ported it to a Linux box, but now we have the whole thing running on a NT/IIS System. Why?

• 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).