Sep 09 2006
An End to ASP
Published by Ivan Groznii at 10:11 am under Rants |
Yesterday, I was asked by my boss to analyse a new competitor’s website. I tried not to laugh too hard while looking at it.
What was creating my amusement was not the operating system or web server software; they’d gone for a perfectly sensible Linux / Apache combination. I merely found it funny that their site was entirely composed of old-fashioned .cgi scripts. This was Perl programming, circa 1997. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, it’s terribly out of date, rather like seeing someone on the street today using a hugely heavy mobile phone from the 1980’s.
This is not a criticism of Perl, mind you. There are many wonderful sites still using it; but most of those had developers with sufficient brains to switch to mod_perl, which offers far better performance, and requires no re-writing of one’s original Perl scripts. Our competitor isn’t that bright, fortunately.
That said, while making out-of-date technology choices for a new venture is definitely bad, maintaining out of date technology for an interim period is a close second.
My company is brighter than our adversary; we fully intend to migrate to PHP / MySQL, which is current, thriving and modern. However at the moment we’re stuck with a great deal of ASP: classic ASP (not ASP.NET) a technology that is reaching its end.
Classic ASP is in steady decline. I can’t think of any major sites that have been launched with it recently; they would look as strange as our competitor using old-fashioned Perl. To me, it’s always been diabolical; to do something as simple as say, turning a bit of text from lower case to upper case, which only requires one command in PHP, requires writing a function in ASP. Furthermore, debugging classic ASP is right up there on my favourite things to do with dentistry and paying taxes. Worse, classic ASP is the home of VBScript; every respectable programmer I know spits on Visual Basic, particularly in its pre .NET form. In their eyes, VBScript opened the door to web programming for people who couldn’t be bothered to learn a proper language.
Truly, being in the classic ASP ghetto is a maddening experience; I know that my developers can do better, they’re certainly talented enough. I also know that if Microsoft pulled the plug on classic ASP support tomorrow, we’ll have a big problem. Lest this seem a dramatic statement, it’s useful to remember that it’s the Microsoft way. For example, they pulled the plug on Visual Foxpro; considering it’s a 32 bit, single threading application, that may not have been a bad idea. Still, it is dislocating; but so long as “progress” is achived in Microsoft’s eyes, they don’t seem to care.
It is true that classic ASP pages are supposed to port into .NET to a point, they do require “minor alterations” to achieve this. “Minor alterations” in my experience means “rewrite and debug”.
There is also a pointlessness inherent in this technology; it’s like continuing to embroider one’s knowledge on how to make buggy whips or perform maintainance on steam powered locomotives. A few people may need to know, or even find it interesting, but the rest of the world has moved on.
As ever, Open Source looks far more intelligent in comparison. Our competitor made an error in not going the mod_perl route, but it’s not a fatal one. Mod_perl’s support for the old and the new means they can utilise its strengths while they learn how to use technology properly. I certainly don’t intend to tell them, however. Hopefully we will have moved on by the time they’ve figured it out. Classic ASP will have reached an end at that point so far as I am concerned; it will be a welcome development when this end is reached for everyone else.
3 Responses to “An End to ASP”
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You don’t intend to tell your competitor they made a classic fubar? By posting this on your blog, you may have already told them. I see this all the time on FOSS-friendly blogs (and remember, I’m not saying this from a FOSS-unfriendly perspective, having migrated full time to Linux when more or less the whole computer industry (minus IBM) thought those doing so were a bunch of cranks). Mostly, it’s people saying that they moved to Linux because MS did or does this or that. Don’t you think that if enough people do this, they will take notice? And they’ll happily give Linux an even harderhill to climb than noob-friendly desktop support and DRM.
Trust me on this one, they aren’t reading this.
I know the people behind the competitor and their understanding of blogs is just as good as their understanding of technology.
No offense, but I wouldn’t call PHP modern in particular. Actually, I think PHP also attracted a lot of people (if not even more) who couldn’t be bothered to learn a proper language which is one of the main reasons of PHP’s popularity, in my opinion. I mean, look at the core functions: One huge namespace with inconsistent naming and behaviour (think of strtr, str_replace, strpos and the like). Talking about current and thriving, I’d say Python and Ruby are clearly superior.