After ASP what next?

[madanthrax]

Hi guys,

During the last few years I have learnt ASP and built smallish webapps, with great help from this forum. I love ASP its been a good friend. Although I could not say like Tarwn that I know it inside out, I can do most things I want.

About two years ago I was sent on a DotNet training course, where the trainer started off by saying "Is it still possible that any of you are STILL using VB/ASP?". His tone made it sound like he was looking for someone from the stone age.

Well after the course I went off and explored .Net, made some simple pages/datagrids, then spent a few weeks trying to get them to do what I really wanted. The DotNet experience was a bit like my recollections of Frontpage 97, mess everywhere.

Now its two years later and some of the other departments here are using DotNet to produce their stuff, to a man all using the same sentance to describe it as difficult but very powerful (think that must have been written on the box). I feel a bit stagnant, but just don't fancy Dotnet.

Our enterprise is tied into to MS products and there is a possibility that in a few years MS will force ASP to not work on their new server platforms (or worse,only making it available via Vista... ;-)) I have been looking for a "next generation" web language to move on to. PHP is not new but seems to be still under development, and is very similar to ASP.

What are your views?

I have searched Tek-Tips and found some posts on this topic, but nothing that covers exactly the above.

Ant

[sub]"Nothing is impossible until proven otherwise"[/sub]​

 

[trollacious]

Ruby on Rails is making big inroads in some areas, from what I've read. That's not MS-oriented, though.

You can do a lot more easily on the programming side with ASP.NET than with classic ASP, and you don't HAVE to use the server-created objects/page elements if you don't want to.

Lee

 

[Tarwn]

The funny thing is that I standardized around .Net several years back, but still hang out mostly in the ASP forums and will occasionally throw things together in ASP rather than .Net.

PHP is very similar to ASP in that it is primarily a procedural scripting language. Meaning you don't have to learn the OO side of it and can basically write PHP the same way you are used o doing ASP. The up-side of it is that it is widely used and there is even more informaiton available on the PHP library and syntax than VBScript (and ASP).

ASP.Net, however, will be a big jump from ASP. It is object and event oriented, and no matter which language you choose to pair with it (VB.Net, C#, etc) you probably have a bit of learning ahead of you. On the other hand, learning any one .Net language really gives you the basics of all of them, since they use the same libraries and only have different syntaxes for accessing those libraries. In my opinion, ASP.net is basically a mess of not-really-events, simple hacks to give you a pseudo-state in a stateless environment (ie, HTTP), and a great number of drag-and-drop objects that will leave you questioning why MS architects continually leave 10% of everything undone in strange places. The power of ASP.Net is the C#/VB.Net/etc behind the scenes. If you already have a good grasp on the stateless environment of server-side web applications, try to forget what you know before starting with ASP.Net, it will be less painful that way.
Not to say that it is all bad, but your biggest advantage is going to be the fact that you get to use a full programming language behind the scenes that compiles down to much faster executables. I have personally found this to be a lot more useful in building intranet web applications with heavy business logic, but execution speed can help on lighter, but busier, internet web apps as well.

Other options include Ruby on Rails, as Lee mentions above, but I haven't really spent any great amount of time no it myself. There is also Cold Fusion, which is a bit of a religious matter. You either like and think it is the best technology on the planet, or can't stand it.
A google search on "Tarwn ColdFusion" will reveal a long-ish commentary and response from soneone else based on ColdFusion being included in ComputerWorlds "Top 10 Dying Computer Skills" list, and the religious debate that followed. The -8 on my comment, and -4 on the response from another poster is likely a reflection of the fact that i did not praise CF above all others. A community willing to follow a technology with religious fervor could be considered a good sign for a language or it could just be another flavor of koolaid for the masses.

Anyways, other options worth checking out are Java (JSP, etc), Perl (There is an ASP-like package for perl CGI Perl::ASP), and any of a dozen CMSs.

 

[Microbe]

I made the move from ASP to PHP a few years ago and reckon it is the best thing I ever did.

IMO it is more powerful, there is more code out there to grab and hack.

Think about the CMS apps for example...how many written PHP are there? Must be dozens...and carts etc.

PHP is not a "new" language like Ruby but combined with mySQL and some AJAX you can do extraordinary things.

Steve

http://www.ColdCallComedy.com

- I have fun with telemarketers

 

[madanthrax]

Thanks for your comments guys, appreciated.

I have a nasty feeling Tarwn/Trollacious are right about .Net, but maybe I am not ready to accept the inevitable yet.

Thanks for cheering me up Microbe.

regards all.

[sub]"Nothing is impossible until proven otherwise"[/sub]​

 

[kss444]

You could always find a cure for cancer.

Ordinary Programmer

 

[xwb]

Look up web services and see where that leads you. It is a standard and you don't have to stick to MS if you don't wish to.

Also, it is a good excuse to learn all the bits of XML that you didn't know existed.