Open Source Software for ASPs?

PsychoKodiac wonders: "I am querying the Slashdot community for help concerning ASP pages. I am currently looking for a solution to create and serve ASP content off of my own computer for the time being. I have been referred to mono_mod and SharpDevelop but I am having a difficult time finding guides or references for using these two Open Source products together. I am attracted to them due to the lack of funds needed to use them. I am hoping some one may be able to refer me to guides or perhaps an alternative to these two products if sufficient guides are not present due to the fact that mono_mod and SharpDevelop are still in development."

Comments

Please evolve

[Safety Cap]

You can program in the much more powerful JSP using freely downloadable Tomcat, or you can go Ruby on Rails and do your thing with the available free tools.

ASP is dead. Please upgrade to the current century.

Thank you.

Re:Please evolve

[LiENUS]

This guy means ASP.Net and if hes the guy i'm thinking of its for a class at college, he showed up in #dotgnu on freenode the other day asking a similar question, JSP and Ruby don't do any good for his instructor.

Re:Please evolve

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of one place where PHP would be appropriate and ASP would not.

ASP is not suitable if you want the source code. ASP is not suitable if you want to write shell scripts. ASP is not suitable if you want to write GUI applications. ASP doesn't have anything like PEAR. ASP doesn't come with a whole load of extensions for doing things like Flash SWF generation, regexps, etc.

Re:Please evolve

[iwan-nl]

JSPs are a good solution for large projects, but for smaller scale projects it would be overkill.

My advise would be to check out php. It's very similar to "classic" ASP. Another option would be perl, but php is a lot easier to learn if you already know asp.

Re:Please evolve

[Anonymous Coward]

This post is very misinformed. ASP's ActiveScripting can be used for shell scripts and GUI applications. Furthermore, regexps are built in, and there's numerous COM extentions for anything you need, including SWF generation. The only valid point is the lack of a PEAR/CPAN-like repository.

WebMatrix

[Goyuix]

If you are running Windows, go take a visit to www.asp.net and look at WebMatrix. It also includes a small web server called Cassini that can serve up .NET content as well.

WebMatrix
http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/default.aspx?tabIndex =4&tabId=46

Cassini Web Server
http://www.asp.net/Projects/Cassini/Download/

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Don't hate me...

I'm a huge fan of .NET, don't get me wrong, but either write it yourself or use real open source tools...

Limitations of Cassini

[parvenu74]

Some of the known limitations of Cassini:
1) Only one ASP.NET application per port.
2) No support HTTPS
3) No support of authentication (NTLM, digest)
4) Only localhost requests

It's #4 that is the show-stopper since the original post implies (or at least I inferred from it) that content is to be served to more than just localhost requests.

If you are leaning toward a Mono implemetation, there is the aforementioned mod_mono as well as XSP -- more info here.

Re:Limitations of Cassini

[pr0c]

It's #4 that is the show-stopper since the original post implies (or at least I inferred from it) that content is to be served to more than just localhost requests.

It takes all of a few seconds to recompile cassini to answer to anyone... IIRC you simply comment out 3 lines.

I'm pretty sure this guy hit #C# on Freenode yesterday or so, he is on linux so the cassini stuff isn't going to work for him anyway.

Not enough information...

[crisco]

What are your goals?

If you wish to learn ASP.NET you should probably look at using Microsoft's technologies, possibly in conjunction with SharpDevelop. There is a great deal of information about ASP.NET online and in print. If you want to know about SharpDevelop, there is a free digital version of their book linked on the page you linked to, maybe thats a good place to start?

If you want to learn ASP.NET on a free software platform you are up against a steep learning curve. I'd reccomend learning ASP.NET on Windows first and then making the transition to Free Software. Starting from scratch with Mono and mod_mono or XSP will be tough. As you've seen, there isn't yet a large enough community around these things to generate an abundance of tutorials, documentations and other resources. You can adapt from the Windows versions, but you'll have to deal with translating database interfaces, web server differences and minor differences in the C# libraries themselves.

If you want to learn web programming in general, Apache with PHP might be a better place to start. While PHP has its drawbacks, it is more widely used and has much more open source software available for it than the ASP.NET platform. Other excellent options have already been suggested, like JSP, Python and Ruby on Rails.

What system are you running?

[stoborrobots]

If you're running Windows, the easiest thing to run ASP in is IIS if you're on XP/2000, or its little brother PWS on Win9X/ME. (They're free for playing around with.) Note: Neither is available for XP Home.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/pwebsrv/d eploy/setuppws.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;306898
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/feat ures/iis.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304197/EN-US/

If you're not, the easiest way to run your ASP is via a free hosting provider:

http://www.brinkster.com/Hosting/Educational.aspx
http://www.aspfree.com/asp/freeasphost.asp
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?q=free+asp+website +hosting

HTH.

Re:Then he should object to the instructor

[phyrz]

When I was at uni we were given a list of recommended books and it was our choice whether we purachsed them or not. Although some of the books were neccessary, there were always several copies available in the library.

More often than not I chose to go without the recommended book, instead utilising web resources.

So yeah, that would suck.