Today I was browsing through the microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general newsgroup and found a nice article linked within a topic where people are talking about classic ASP and its brother .net. The article outlines 8 reasons to stick with the good old classic ASP … Unfortunately I cannot really figure out when the article was written but i think it must be quite recent because they bring up VS2005 and web 2.0.
As I have done already some projects with .net I love this statement (refers to web-projects):
Sluggish is a word to describe the whole of the .NET development environment. Starting a new project? Go make a cup of coffee. Switching between tabs? ‘Go large’ with your coffee. Pressing F1 for help? Make your coffee a take-out and go and have a stroll in the park.
When talking about Microsoft products this generally means that a product will become discontinued after lets say 5 years and there are no support and bugfixes available. So isn’t it dangerous to stick with classic ASP and rely on it?
indeed it is risky but sometimes its not so easy and not really necessary to change the platform. and what if you love the advantages over the big brother .net … however the best thing would be to switch to PHP
Switching to PHP will give you a huge advantage, and a massive cummunity for support. The problem is, ASP is slowly been forgotten.
I suppose M$ does not want to support it any more cause there is no money in it. The pushed front page for ASP, but that failed, and now with .NET, developers “need” VS2005 and it makes things so “easy” to compile!
(I don’t think there will come a time, when you have to compile your PHP website, before you can view it!)
This also means lots of “new” programmers will never have heard of Classic ASP 3.0 and won’t be able to practive what you preach!
thats unfortunately bloody true …
Well keep in mind that you are in a way talking about 2 different things. Compiled language and interpreted. is not an evolution of classic ASP but originally a rip off of JSP but much easier to code with. When you think or JSP you are thinking scability first.
I cannot find the source anymore I will try to come back and put a link here but Classic ASP won’t disapear that quickly. First Classic ASP IS the platform that put Microsoft on the web as a serious candidate for dynamic web sites. Secondly if you are thinking market share and/or popularity of a certain technology, taking away Classic ASP will leave the door open to PHP in the interpreted language world to become THE interpreted language of choice. I use these 3 technologies on a daily basis and in a lot of ways when you have to use compiled languages the maintenance of a site or update of code can become cumbersome, in my own experience.
why not ASP in JScript?
JS has been evolved a new language to me, by Jack’s EXT code(www.extjs.com), and I’d like to use his code in Server-side.
MS pushed into .net so websites could be built like desktop applications. Unfortunately, it has ballooned into a labyrinth of overly complex code and tools with a never-ending learning curve.
People never achieve productive levels of development and MS keeps revising versions with breaking changes !
Ironically, Ajax has resolved most of the “Desktop look and feel” objectives so advanced .net coding isn’t really required. Over time Ajax will end up as the standard because it is open source.
The Classic ASP environment, albeit interpreted, now is much more practical in that it can be learned, it doesn’t keep changing and even has some development tools with debugging now available.
The only two constraints I know of are having to use COM libraries for uploads and thumbnailing of images.
Although, most webhosts now offer free use of components for these two requirements.
another one who share my thoughts
i didnt know the sitepoint forums .. they seem to be quite good … I am using Adobe Homesite for my codings. It has the best code highlighting i know
About this quote “starting new project” , he forgot “starting a new Solution”
this worse another cup of coffee,
by the way what if i want put 2 websites under same domain
.NET is away now … its PHP revolution.
I will keep my .net solutions. Besides if you have a good managed server provided you can get all the ASP help you need and more. I run a Server Intellect server and they support all my ASP sites and can get what I need fixed right away. Its a PHP revolution, but a .net world!
I agree with this article. For Windows development, I’ll stick with Classic ASP.
First, moving to .Net almost means learning a new language from scratch. Next, from what I saw from .Net, it needs two files for every pages: Client side file and sever side file. With classic ASP one file does both. Another thing, .Net is so interconnected with server’s OS that a simple Windows Update can make your site doesn’t work anymore. And as Tim Walton (author of the article), I’ve developed over the years a lot of functions of mine and it could be really hard (if not impossible!) to convert them to .Net.
On July 2ndDee wrote that it needs COM object for upload and thumbnailing of images. For thumbnailing it’s true but for upload, there’s some ASP classes out there that do the job. Even for sending email from the server side.
Am I concerned about the fact that one day M$ and “Uncle Bill” won’t support ASP anymore? Not really! If one day Windows doesn’t support ASP, there’s a lot of server software out there that do the job and can be installed on Windows.
So I don’t think I will one day move to .Net. Instead, I looking to learn and practice with JSP. The scripts are compiled but stay on the server as script. It’s multi-platform so the scripts can be ported on Linux with very small changes.
As for me, the only “turn-off” of sticking with Classic ASP is the lack of contract as more and more clients are looking for .Net programmers. As I’m coming back in the “freelance world” it’s a major thing to consider!