Slashdot Mirror
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 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!