On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 11:02:22PM -0400, STEVEWABC at netscape.net wrote:
> Here goes another 200 Hrs ...

OK.  Settle down for a minute.  You're trying to use the crappy ASP
notation that IIS uses with a .NET framework, right?  If you want to
continue using this setup, you will need to do a little research.

I don't know much about .NET, but as someone suggested earlier, there is
the Mono project, and it looks like they've created an ASP.NET solution
(http://www.go-mono.com/asp-net) for use with Apache
(http://www.apache.org).  This may be your best Free Software solution,
and certainly the only one that implements C#.

ChiliSoft (http://www.chilisoft.com) -- now Sun ONE Active Server Pages
4.0 -- is a commercial product that may save you your 200+ hours of
work.  If you don't want to pay money (List Price: $495.00) for your
project, then you need to look into Open Source and Free Software
solutions.

As to the differences between PHP, Python, and Perl, PHP is a
server-side scripting language designed specifically for serving web
pages.  It has a low overhead to learn how to use it, and most ISP's and
Linux distributions support it "out of the box".

Python and Perl are actual programming languages that did not start out
for Web CGI or scripting.  They started out as honest-to-goodness
application programming languages.  They each have vastly different
histories and methodologies, and they have an equally religious
following.  Python and Perl require CGI libraries or application server
frameworks to serve pages, but they can be more flexible than PHP.

If you want to write applications that don't involve the Internet,
consider learning Python (my favorite) or Perl.

Here are a few projects to consider:

    * PHP: http://www.php.net
        Although PHP understands the basic ASP markup "<?" "/?>", you
        will need to alter the actual programming language from Visual
        Basic Scripting to PHP.  It's not a signigicant change, so don't
        freak out about refactoring your programs.

    * http://www.apache-asp.org/
        "Apache::ASP provides an Active Server Pages port to the Apache
        Web Server with Perl scripting only..."

        This may or may not be what you're looking for.  Again, you may
        have to change your programming/scripting language to Perl
        instead of VBScript or JScript.

    * http://spyce.sourceforge.net/
        "SPYCE is a server-side language that supports simple and
        efficient Python-based dynamic HTML generation. Those who are
        familiar with JSP, PHP, or ASP and like Python, should have a
        look at Spyce. Its modular design makes it very flexible and
        extensible. It can also be used as a command-line utility for
        static text pre-processing or as a web-server proxy."

Now, there are at least three different "Python Server Pages" projects
out there.  If you're looking for a pure Python solution, look at the
following link.  This version of PSP runs on top of an application
server called "Webware for Python".  Unfortunately, this has a bit of a
knowledge barrier for new Python programmers.  You have to learn a lot
to deploy this setup.

    * http://webware.sourceforge.net/Webware-0.7/PSP/Docs/
        " A Python Server Page (or PSP) is an HTML document with
        interspersed Python instructions that are interpreted to
        generate dynamic content. PSP is analogous to PHP, Microsoft's
        ASP and Sun's JSP. PSP sits on top of (and requires) WebKit and
        therefore benefits from its features."

Now, I haven't mentioned Zope (http://www.zope.org) yet, but I certainly
should.  Zope uses it's own markup languages, DHTML and TAL.  Both are
very cool and have a very low knowledge barrier to use.  Zope installs
much cleaner than Webware and it has lots of binary packages out there
(Redhat, Debian, etc.).  Check it out if you're curious.

-- 
Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */
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