Reasons to Develop in ASP

[Mark_Smith]

Active Server Pages are a server-side scripting technology primary developed to work under IIS (Internet Information Server) on Windows NT Server (3rd party products exist enabling the use of ASP on other server platforms). ASP enables the server to deliver dynamic, database driven content to the client with minimal effort.

The goal of this article is not to move developers from other wonderful technologies to ASP, but to explain the advantages of Active Server Pages to Web designers, programmers and anyone interested in Web development. ASP is not my first server-side scripting technology. I was developing with Netscape Server-Side JavaScript, Borland IntraBuilder and Oracle Web Application Server before I moved to ASP. Now I'm an ASP developer, and I will try to explain why I think ASP is currently the best choice for general Web developer.

Ease of Use

Active Server Pages are plain HTML pages with ASP code embedded into them enclosed in <% and %> tags. You just place ASP files into a directory on the server with scripting or execute permissions and your ASPs are ready to run. Whenever you need to change something you just edit the .asp files and that's it, your changes are applied.

Language Independence

ASP is a scripting engine enabling you to develop in virtually any language of your choice. The two languages available by default are VBScript and JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript); however, modules for Perl, Python and other languages already exist and there are virtually no limits for support for other languages to be implemented. This enables the novice ASP developer to utilize his or her previous programming experience. If you have ever programmed in Visual Basic or VBA (the version of Visual Basic used in the MSOffice suite), you will have no problems starting with VBScript. If you're familiar with JavaScript, then JScript is your choice. Unix gurus will find that Perl can be used readily.

Short Learning Curve

As you have seen, you may use your current expertise in some programming language or technology to jump into ASP in short time. Even if you know only HTML, it will not be difficult for you to learn how to insert ASP commands into your HTML files. Why, you ask? Just keep reading....

Tons of Information

There are currently more than 150 sites listed in Open Directory's ASP category. This is more than for any other server-side development engine or language. Lots of online magazines will deliver new articles on ASP to your mailbox on a weekly or even daily basis. There's a lot of resources out there for ASP, folks.

Huge Community

There are plenty of professional ASP developers ready to answer your questions in numerous ASP newsgroups and forums. For instance, on the day I write this article, there are more than 50 new threads in the microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general newsgroup alone.

[ALL]

thanks, but i would tend to disagree with your assessment, however, this is just my oppinion in the matter, and i am not discouraging asp by any means.

I am a PHP, JavaScript, PERL, VB & VB.NET programmer. I have writen many applcications in VB & VB.NET; infact, VB6 was my very first language.

After working with VB for years, i started working with perl for a few months. After learning most of what perl has to offer, i started to learn PHP; now i am pretty much a PHP person.

I do howerver, believe VB/ASP is a very short learning curve, especially for first time languages.

The reason i dislike ASP so much is because it is windows dependent. This means that scripts writen in it cannot be ported over to Linux, Unix, BSD or other servers. I am not a big fan of IIS either, because in my experiances in working with apache and IIS i have found that IIS is much more unreliable than apache. IIS may make it eassier to do things, but would you rather have reliability or useability, that is what it comes down too. Also in reading many articles and from personal experiance i have found that non-windows systems are much more reliable and have less downtime than windows.

But dont take this as anything but my oppinion

-ALL