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

[tim256]

Yes, JSP, php, servlets, and ASP.Net are all superior technologies to ASP. However, I sometimes use ASP for simple intranet sites. It's a little easier than other web languages if you are using Windows. All you have to do is turn on IIS and drop in your asp files. Doesn't everyone already know VB script anyways?

On the post, the guy said something about mono. Why would you use mono, unless you are using linux or unix? If you're using linux, why would you want to use ASP.Net? That's insane! The original poster needs to buy a book on web development before going further.

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

[der_joachim]

ASP is dead. Please upgrade to the current century.

Disagreed. ASP is still widely used. I don't like it. It lacks some nice nifty stuff that is almost standard for languages such as PHP or Perl. But as long as it comes with PWS/IIS, it will be used by developers.

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.

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/

Get your feet wet!

[QuietRiot]

Jump in and start developing! This is a wonderful way to learn your way around these new packages and explore what they currently can and cannot do. Download the source, compile and try and add a feature your project needs. Give yourself a Saturday or Sunday if you have to work otherwise and see what you can make of it. You'll soon discover whether or not it's ready for your project.

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.

ASP is not open source

[Claire-plus-plus]

I would say that your best bet would be to use something that is actually open source like PHP. ASP does some pretty cool stuff granted but open source is open source and ASP is not. If you want to save money go with PHP (or JSP not that I know much about JSP). The main benefit of using open source software like PHP or JSP is that you don't have to use a Mico$oft server.

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

[damiam]

And how awful would it be if a course could be completed only with a specific textbook that all students were forced to buy? Oh, the horror!

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.

Know what you are doing.

[__aafkqj3628]

Are you talking about ASP or ASP.NET?

If you are talking about ASP and you're not running Windows, then you'll probably need something like ChillISoft ASP. It's old, not free, but that's the price you pay for using legacy technologies on unsupported systems.

If you're talking about ASP.NET, then you're looking for mono. I'd suggest you go to http://www.go-mono.net/ and read the documentation there or even use Google. There's more than enough information there to guide you through setup and mailing-lists for these kinds of questions.

Slashdot's mods approve questions like this (unclear, unstructured, and could be solved with Google), yet reject perfectly good questions that might be of interest to other people.

Help with ASP.NET

[quamaretto]

It sounds like what you need is just a testing environment for ASP.NET code, and some basic instructions. I messed around with this a few weeks ago, so I know where you're at.

If so, you don't really need Apache/mod_mono; just use XSP, which is just an ASP.NET server written in C# by the Mono project. It may not be as fast, but you can test away with it.

Your toolbox on your local computer should probably be Mono, mcs (C# compiler), MonoDevelop (Based on SharpDevelop), XSP, and the ASP.NET examples for Mono. These are all provided by the Windows, OS X and Linux packages on go-mono.com. If you're using debian, though, you can get them as seperate packages.

Once you've got all that, copy the ASP.NET demos into your home directory, then go to that directory and run XSP (in debian, the command is just 'xsp') and take a look at the examples.

You can change or create .aspx files directly and XSP will compile them for you when you visit them; but compiling libraries and code behind files requires a command along the lines of "mcs -t:library -o CodeBehind.dll CodeBehind.cs" or something.

I hope that gets you started.