[Sussex] Some Simplicity

[Geoff Teale]

> I've never really put any effort into PHP and have still 
> managed to achieve some pretty amazing results.  Certainly my 
> language of choice.  Which kind of people, other than M$ of 
> course, are saying ASP is easier to debug than PHP?

Unfortunately commercial developers are a strangely conservative bunch.
Mostly they want to stick with what they know and what they _think_ they
know.  Mostly they know VB, VBScript[1], SQL Server or Access.  So what you
get is a bunch of people who have some skills and will defend those skills
irrationaly (I should point out this is true of developers from all
disciplins) whether they are aware of it or not.  However, these guys also
know that they have to keep moving forward and acquiring more modern skills
in order to stay employable.  So, they all want to play with the latest
version of what they already know - because they think they already know it
and it will be easy. 

To my mind, if it's not my company doing it I really don't care what peoples
relative concerns are, if it's working for them then that's fine.  Within
certain bounds ASP[1] will run on UNIX (Sun One ASP (formerlly
ChilliSoft!)).  Frankly since Apache 2.0 choosing to use _that_ platform is
the most important decision you'll make.  A well run Windows 2000 sevrer,
running Apache 2 and nothing else and sitting behind a firewall is a good
solution - I'm not saying that a different OS wouldn't be sensible, but if
you're a windows shop with windows people managing an additional windows
machine is going to be cheap.  

If this were my firm then I would argue on a broader basis than which is
easier to debug, but I have no qualms with ASP itself other than it is
associated to heavily with a steaming pile of poo called Internet
Information Server - thats what you should be criticising.

In my former role at the W3C I would recommend that you all use JigSaw with
Tomcat and code _everything_ in Java - a much better solution for serious
web development :)  ..but back in reality Apache 2 is the place to be
Web-tech wise.


[1]Active Server Pages is a technology _not_ a language - the languages are
VBScript and JScript, though it is possible to write other languages using a
custom ASAPI filter (I know, because I spent 50% of my time for 6 months
writing a collection of such ASAPI filters for a inhouse CMS at Thomson).
Neither VBScript or JScript are open standards, although JScript is broadly
similar to ECMAScript (which is often incorrectly refered to as Javascript).

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you."
-- Dylan Thomas


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