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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."
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.
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WebMatrix
http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/default.aspx?tabInde
Cassini Web Server
http://www.asp.net/Projects/Cassini/Download/
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.
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.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
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.
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.
Bleh!
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.d eploy/setuppws.mspx ; en-us;306898 t ures/iis.mspx
e +hosting
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/pwebsrv/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/fea
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+websit
HTH.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
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.