.asp viewer

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

You're pretty much screwed.  ASP is a Microsoft-proprietary scheme for
doing pretty much what everyone else does differently.  Consistent with
the usual Microsoft-against-the-world design philosophy, ASP is largely an
undocumented moving target that means slightly different things to
different people.

At bottom, ASP is a scripting language, and it is possible to translate
ASP into one or another more standard scripting language, either by
preprocessing or on the fly.  If you want ASP on Unix, the accepted Open
Source solution is to use Apache::ASP from:

	http://www.nodeworks.com/asp/

Of course, this requires a fully configured server to work.  The Summit
Software people -- http://www.activescripting.org/ -- have a less capable
approach with a funny license that I think only works with Apache on
Win32, but they do claim to have an engine that can run ASP directly
inside a Win32 browser.

The problem is that ASP is not just a scripting language, but is also a
mechanism for calling into a library of Microsoft-proprietary functions
provided by Microsoft IIS.  If you allow FrontPage to generate ASP code
for you, then it is almost guaranteed that much of that code will depend
upon such IIS-specific library functions which, except for the most basic,
are unlikely to exist in Apache::ASP.

As for "only available tool," I assume that any modern Windows version has
Notepad; if not, then EDLIN would be available.  Either will work
perfectly well for creating internationally standard web documents.

-- Mike


On 2000-05-15 at 13:19 -0400, Massimo Morin wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 	I'm not a Windows expert, but a friend of mine asked for some help:
> He is developing a small database accessible via internet that allows
> users to insert, modify and search data. Its main purpose is for
> internal surveys.
> They are using FrontaPage 2000 but it generates .asp files and they do
> not know how to visualize them.
> I thought netscape was able to use them but...
> 
> Ah!.. I was going to suggest a full blown of Linux + Apache + Perl +
> MySQL but it looks like FrontPage 2000 is their only available tool.
> 
> Any idea or any suggestion on how to help him??
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Max


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