Preserved Topic: asp good? (Page 1 of 1)

just want to ask!!

Nope.

Seconded.

Why limit yourself?

-mage-

No? Why?

I've been thinking about picking up a book on ASP recently, read somewhere it's really powerful with Perl?? And there's a thousand and one Jobs for ASP/SQL programmers in Brisbane compared to PHP or JSP

everybody needs a swamp bear

OOP

-mage-

Function Is_ASP_Good Returns Boolean

   Is_ASP_Good  = False

End Function

dunno if the syntax is correct - should compile tho



[This message has been edited by kevincar (edited 06-30-2001).]

yeah, a world o help you guys are

heh

everybody needs a swamp bear

Ok, then let me give you more.

ASP has its primary language rooted in MS Visual Basic Script... which is a horrible language. It is not Object Orriented, it is clunky, and it is not very readable (IMO of course).

ASP now has an apache extention which all seem to be raving about, because now you are able to take the shit language over to the *nix platforms... however if you are to be working on a *nix platform and want an easy language you would pick up PHP because it is terribly easy. Then you realize that PHP also works on windows... so everything becomes much nicer when you use PHP... (this point is to be made moot in a second).

Next I would want to ask myself why in the world I would be using IIS as my server. Since it is a horrible server, is so very slow, and can't handle large loads, and starts fires due to constantly straining under the load. You would need an 800 MHz PIII with a Win System to handle the same kind of load that a 486 *nix machine will give you. I have heard a story of a T1 reaching its limits on a 486 unix server, the 486 didn't reach its.

ASP is becoming a language that people in business are using because they don't know any better. It probally started when some fool read and believe an article by MS and said I should get into this... or some VB programmer who got laid off decided instead of actually learning something valuable I will try to maket myself as an ASP developer, and some stupid person hired him. It then became a MS sponsored fad with no real power other than the advirtising, it takes off, foolishly, and then people say "WoW, people are learning this ASP stuff, maybe I should too..." and it spirals down from there.

Next thing you know, you do actually need the new 1,250 MHz computer with 500 meg of ram to be your server because your server can't handle the 250 requests an hour it recieves. Soon you have a small farm of worthless equipment handling 1,000 requests and hour, and are wondering why, with a $25,000 to $50,000 dollars worth of hardware your not generating a lot of money, and you still have server problems...

Mean while SourceForge sits back in comfort watching the mistakes of those caught in the MS world spending tons and tons of money, while they have really stable system, free server software, and hardware not nearly as expensive as the stuff the MS peepz need serving 100 times as much, and feeling 1000 times less strain and problems.

Now that written above is why ASP is bad. Take it as you will. Maybe I am entirely wrong, and non-OOP languages are making some strange come back, maybe MS does make a good stable system, maybe you don't need to reboot every few days, maybe they do have cheap software. Maybe ASP should be your language of choice...

I reccommend PERL/PHP/Java/C++ over and above any incarnation of ASP any day of the week. VB Script, Server Side JavaScript, fuck both of them. They are not as usefull as any of the prementioned, will really not take you anywhere other than the bowels of the MS pit of despair. But try your hand at it, you may like it until you see the power than can be gotten out of other outlets...

-mage-

WarMage, I wasn't really serious thus the ' ' but thank's for the extra info all the same. I really appreciate it.

everybody needs a swamp bear

hmmm
WarMage, are you saying ASP bad or iis bad? or both?

what if I use php module on iis, will it be slow as you said?
what if I use winApache, will it be slow too?

the reason windows is being slow for server, is that because of the OS or the server app?

Both (ASP & IIS) are bad. IIS is bad because it has many security holes (even here on Asylum you can find a few topics about some of them), so if you want to have more or less secure web server running IIS, you would have to visit Microsoft's update web site every day to see if there are any new patches. The speed depends on many factors. Windows by nature requires much more power than Linux, so that's why you would need 1Ghz+ processor with much RAM memory in order to seriously run Windows based web server.

One thing about ASP, it's easy to learn and use, and it's widely accepted. Granted it doesn't hold a flame to php, perl, etc when it comes to large applications... but I'm not writing large complicated applications, and I doubt galaxal is either. It's a good, quick way of creating server side scripts that doesn't get all boged down with syntax and complicated structures. Of course everyone here hates it because it doesn't do what they want (which is write big complicated apps).

Security holes?? ok, there are some holes I'm sure, as with most anything on the web. You would be a fool not to make backups (even if you were using php or perl). And again, if you are writing large apps for highly secure web sites, ASP isn't for you, but to add a little back end to your home page, who cares if there are holes! If someone hacks my page (real likely ), I'll just wipe it out and upload the latest backup, it'll take me all of 10 minutes.

Asking if ASP is good or not in this forum is like asking if a Mac is good in a PC only forum Except I should hope that most of the folks here have actually tried using ASP.




-It never hurts to always be right-

Debugged ASP duel page guest book. (stolen from: http://www.asp101.com/samples/guestbook.asp)

<%

Const bDeleteEntries = True



Dim bForce

bForce = Request.QueryString("force")



Dim strFile



strFile = Server.MapPath("guestbook.txt")



If Request.Form.Count = 0 Then

	%>

	<H3>Sign Our Guestbook:</H3>

	<FORM ACTION="guestbook.asp" METHOD="post">

	<TABLE>

		<TR>

		<TD ALIGN="right"><B>Name:</B></TD>

		<TD><INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="name" SIZE="15"></INPUT></TD>

		</TR>

		<TR>

		<TD ALIGN="right"><B>Comment:</B></TD>

		<TD><INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="comment" SIZE="35"></INPUT></TD>

		</TR>

	</TABLE>

	<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Sign Guestbook!"></INPUT>

	</FORM>



	<BR>



	<H3>Today's Comments:</H3>

	<!-- Instead of doing this in script, I simply include

			the guestbook file as is -->

	<!--#INCLUDE FILE="guestbook.txt"-->

	<%

Else

	Dim objFSO  

	Dim objFile 

	

	Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

	Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFile, 8, True)



	objFile.Write "<B>"

	objFile.Write Server.HTMLEncode(Request.Form("name"))

	objFile.Write ":</B> "

	objFile.Write Server.HTMLEncode(Request.Form("comment"))

	objFile.Write "<BR>"

	objFile.WriteLine ""

	

	objFile.Close

	Set objFile = Nothing

	Set objFSO = Nothing



	%>

	<H3>Your comments have been written to the file!</H3>

	<A HREF="./guestbook.asp">Back to the guestbook</A>

	<%

End If



If bDeleteEntries Then

	Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

	Set objFile = objFSO.GetFile(strFile)

	If DateDiff("d", objFile.DateLastModified, Date()) <> 0 Or bForce <> "" Then

		Set objFile = Nothing		

		Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strFile, True)



		objFile.Write "<B>John:</B> "

		objFile.WriteLine "I hope you like our guestbook!<BR>"

		objFile.Close

	End If

	Set objFile = Nothing

	Set objFSO = Nothing

End If

%>

Buggy PHP duel page guest book. (just wrote it for the occation)

<?

if (!$name &#0124; &#0124; !$comment)

{

	echo ('

		<h3>Sign Our Guestbook:</h3>

		<form action="guestbook.php" method="post">

		<table>

		<tr>

		<td align="right"><b>Name:</b></td>

		<td><input type="text" name="name" size="15"></td>

		</tr>

		<tr>

		<td align="right"><b>Comment:</b></td>

		<td><input type="text" name="comment" size="35"></td>

		</tr>

		</table>

		<input type="submit" value="Sign Guestbook!">

		</form>

		<br>

		<h3>Today\'s Comments:</h3>'

		);

include("guestbook.txt");

}

else

{

	$newfile = @fopen("guestbook.txt","a+");

	@fwrite($newfile,"<b>$name :</b> $comment");

	@fclose($newfile);

	echo('

		<h1>Your has been added</h1>

		<a href="guestbook.php">Back to the Book</a>

	');

?>

11 lines to code the meat of the document write in ASP
3 lines to code the meat of the document write in PHP

This is however not an exercise of how compact the code is, but instead of how readable the code is.

The hardest part of the PHP version to read is the "a+" portion which is a standard call to open a file for reading and writing, placing the cursor at the bottom of the document.

While the ASP on the other hand... do you have your pocket reference on you by chance?

I currently code in (checks resume) 13 languages, and I will tell you that in all the languages I use, VB and VBScript are by far the worst languages I have ever used. They are slow to code, and far from intuitive, and at the least harm your attempt to progress to new and better things, because it is a limited language, it is an unsecure language.

Your biggest arguement is that you won't be coding anything huge that would need to be secure... that is one hell of a farse, why would you want to learn how to do this stuff unless you have huge ambitions, unless you want to learn of file writing and of database management. Why in the world would you want to limit yourself.

And BTW your unsecure scripts don't just mean your site can get hacked, if your scripts are set up correctly you could give control of the entire computer over to someone. Where 8 different variety of trojans and key grabbers are secretly loaded into the computer, and all the information stored in the computer is taken and used for the worst purposes. Security is a huge issue, don't even pretent to underestimate is value.

But I would love to hear some more arguements at why it is a good language.

-mage-

quote:

---

Your biggest arguement is that you won't be coding anything huge that would need to be secure... that is one hell of a farse, why would you want to learn how to do this stuff unless you have huge ambitions, unless you want to learn of file writing and of database management. Why in the world would you want to limit yourself.

---

I would never try to code a compliated app in ASP, that would be stupid. You have pointed out all the reasons why not to, and I agree with those. ASP however is good for learning the basics of server side scripting, and database back ends like you said. Was PHP your first language? Would you have wanted to start out that way? Not me.

quote:

---

And BTW your unsecure scripts don't just mean your site can get hacked, if your scripts are set up correctly you could give control of the entire computer over to someone. Where 8 different variety of trojans and key grabbers are secretly loaded into the computer, and all the information stored in the computer is taken and used for the worst purposes. Security is a huge issue, don't even pretent to underestimate is value.

---

I wont and never did pretend that security isn't a big issue. Let's face it, unless I'm running the server on my end I shouldn't have to worry about the security of the whole server. I trust that the money I spend on my server space is being put to good use. By that I mean the admins are watching for security holes, and applying patches whenever needed. If they thought they couldn't handle the hacks from ASP pages they wouldn't allow their clients to use ASP. However I don't think that is relevant here because we are more concerned with our little area of the server. And unless I'm working on a high profile site with a lot of hits, or a site with sensitive materials, I could care less if the code is hacker proof.

The question wasn't which is better, PHP or ASP, it was "is asp good?". And I think it has some good qualities, which you failed to point out. I am simply offering a less biased oppinion. I'll say it again, ASP has some issues, it's not as good as PHP in most aspects, but it is not bad. If it were it would never have been developed or adopted.




-It never hurts to always be right-

Just a note I've seen ASP used a lot in Intranet applications.

Personally I think this is because Windows platforms are the IT departments platforms of choice Since most corporate Networks are NT or Novell based. I'd stay away from It and don't see it much on the web side these days.


Walking the Earth like Kane

Well, I've only looked ad tiny bits of ASP and PHP. I have an ASP book, read about half of it know and I still can't do anything usefull with it!

As for PHP, I've been reading through tutes online and I'm alredy starting to write simple apps with it. Mainly because the syntax is so farmilar to what I do know of Perl and JS. So i've decided to ditch ASP cause it just doesn't make sence to me.

But, I now feel a little better knowing that it possibly doesn't make much sence to me because of my current (or lack there of) programming background. For a while their everyone was saying that ASP was so easy and I was like? WTF, your kidding right... but that could also be because of the book I have, I have a tendance to pick up badly written books .

Besides, I have an unlimited space account on a *nix server with Perl, PHP and MySQL support, which means I can actualy start to put my SQL knowledge to work. Trying to find a decent ASP hoast for free is a bit of a drag too.

Oh, I was also reading through the PHP FAQ and came accross some stuff on ASP runing in PHP? what's up with that, I couldn't quite understand what they were talking about? What would be the advantages of running ASP in PHP? or it that just not possible.

Oh, and one more question for you guys if you don't mind be asking... What's Active X? I've read some stuff on it here but I've never found a solid definition as to what it does, what it's used for and what/who can use it??

everybody needs a swamp bear