[badtz]

I have a programmer friend that I'm convincing to switch over to OS X ....

what question that she asked that I'm stumped on is ....

about ASP programming for OS X? Does it exist? If so, how?


Any help would be great! Thanks!

[Angus_D]

ASP is a Microsoft technology. It exists only on Windows. Having said that, Mono has been ported to OS X and they have an ASP.NET implementation (see here).

There are also a wide variety of other web-based application development frameworks and languages available on OS X, however. PHP, Java (JSP, J2EE, WebObjects, etc), Python (Zope, Plone, etc), Perl, and so on. By all accounts ASP sucks anyway.

[larkost]

While I am not a fan of ASP, it does have some nice points. As Angus_D said, there is no good way of doing ASP development on Mac's (it can be done with emulators, or running everything remotely... but these are not "good" solutions).

ASP is very comparable to PHP, with a few exceptions (and quite a number of language quirks in both systems). The main points to keep in mind when comparing PHP and ASP:

ASP has the session and application objects. PHP can do the session idea very well (for some purposes much better than ASP) but lacks the concept of an Application object. If this is important to you, check out Biferno.

PHP can run on a frightening array of web servers and OS's, ASP can run on Windows/IIS. There is also the licensing issue, PHP is always free, whereas ASP/IIS requires licensing for the volume of traffic you will be hosting.

Most of the big ASP programs are only little bits of ASP gluing COM/DCOM objects together. This sort of thing can be done in PHP, but is usually not worth the hassle. PHP on the other hand can do a lot more by itself. If you are using pre-built COM/DCOM objects, then you are already stuck on Windows, and should use ASP. In other cases, PHP might be the way to go.

Beyond that, there are a lot of other systems that might be the right one, but most of them are for heavier systems (such as my favorite: WebObjects).

[Arkham_c]

As others said, ASP is not a native Mac/UNIX technology. However, there are ways to do ASP on OSX if you really want to:

http://www.apache-asp.org/ (free)

http://wwws.sun.com/software/chilisoft/ (commercial)


If you decide that converting ASP to PHP is the way to go, this may help:

http://asp2php.naken.cc/


Personally, I use Java servlets for any internal applications, and PHP for any that will be hosted on a third party ISP (because servlet support at ISPs is hard to come by). ASP is Microsoft Kool-Aid, so I never develop or recommend it to my clients. PHP works on Windows and UNIX hosts alike.

[itai195]

Originally posted by larkost:
While I am not a fan of ASP, it does have some nice points. As Angus_D said, there is no good way of doing ASP development on Mac's (it can be done with emulators, or running everything remotely... but these are not "good" solutions).

ASP is very comparable to PHP, with a few exceptions (and quite a number of language quirks in both systems). The main points to keep in mind when comparing PHP and ASP:

One of the biggest issues with ASP that I discovered when using it is that it can't really handle file uploads without the programmer having to either reinvent the wheel or buy a third party package.

badtz, if your friend absolutely has to program ASP, there are environments on Mac that will help her write code (Macromedia Dreamweaver on the Mac supports ASP development, for example) but as others have said she'd have to have Win/IIS to test and deploy it, or use one of the packages Arkham linked to.

[Kristoff]

You are all missing the point.
The value proposition of ASP is that you can leverage COM/ActiveX objects.
Without Windows, that value proposition is gone.

I want your friend to switch too. But he'll have to give up his dependencies on Microsoft Technology if he wants to work outside of Windows.

[Theodour]

Originally posted by Kristoff:
You are all missing the point.
The value proposition of ASP is that you can leverage COM/ActiveX objects.
Without Windows, that value proposition is gone.

I want your friend to switch too. But he'll have to give up his dependencies on Microsoft Technology if he wants to work outside of Windows.

Yeah, that's it exactly. At my school, people are only excited if it is "Microsoft" technology. Maybe they don't want to be intimidated with other options that they would have to learn. Whether or not the consequences of having a single private enterprise in charge of all future information flow ever crosses their minds is a mystery to me.

Here is another link to a perl-based ASP mimic ,,,

http://search.cpan.org/~timmy/ASP-1.07/ASP.pm

You have to point out to your friend that you can do some pretty flashy stuff by just following open standards, though. And cool freeky wierdo code geeks would think she was cool, too -- and that's gotta count for something!

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by Theodour:
Yeah, that's it exactly. At my school, people are only excited if it is "Microsoft" technology. Maybe they don't want to be intimidated with other options that they would have to learn. Whether or not the consequences of having a single private enterprise in charge of all future information flow ever crosses their minds is a mystery to me.

I always wondered who those people were. I've worked at one privately owned profitable company, 2 Fortune 500 companies, one startup, and one university. I've yet to find any company that considered Windows a viable server platform for anything but Exchange email. The developers I know don't consider MS to be a legitimate development option for the enterprise. I tend to feel the same way. I'd pick Java and Linux/UNIX over .NET/Windows 100 times out of 100. There's NO value proposition there for me at all.

[Kristoff]

I used to work at Motorola and they are one--if not the--biggest deployment of Microsoft Windows in the world. (or used to be before they sold all their divisions)

In fact, I remember at JavaOne a few years ago--when I still worked there--I went to look at some of their new high-end handset. They all had PC connectivity (pre-bluetooth) with db-9 rs-232 cables. I was like WTF? I asked one of the guys why no USB, and why only Windows connectivity software. He looked at me like I was speaking alien.

I told him Macs haven't shipped with serial ports in years. He said they weren't marketing to us. I laughed and said something like--yeah....let's ignore the market segment that likes high-end stuff and instead try to convince Dell owners to spend as much on their cell phone as they do on their computers--rolled my eyes and walked away.

My current phone is a Sony Ericsson T-610. Anyone want to guess why???

And let's not forget.....look at my sig!

[TampaDeveloper]

Doing a search on ASP.Net and came across this post.

FYI: ASP and ASP.NET are two entirely different things. While its true that ASP.NET does offer some backwards compatibility, the ASP.NET programming model is completely different. And also, FYI, it doesn't suck at all. I know of no other methodology that so successfully hides the web-app development dirt from the developer (And yes, thats a good thing that everybody will probably be doing eventually).

[Kristoff]

A proper MVC model 2 architecture using JSP, taglibs and EJB does just that.

But, it takes people who know what they're doing.

[Brass]

I'm amazed at how many educational services train students to learn MS technology instead of training them to learn information technology.

Ie, they teach people to use Word, instead of teaching them about word processing; they teach people to use ASP instead of teaching them programing/scripting.

People should be taught to use general technology, and helped to understand a variety of implementations and gain the knowledge to make their own decision as to which tools to use.

Too often people get fed the MS dogfood, and don't even know that other options exist.

[Kristoff]

I don't mind, more jobs for those of us who can think outside the Redmond box.

[TampaDeveloper]

Originally posted by Kristoff:
I don't mind, more jobs for those of us who can think outside the Redmond box.

The instant you resign yourself to only thinking "outside" a box, you put yourself in another box. I say, know them both.

[Brass]

Originally posted by TampaDeveloper:
The instant you resign yourself to only thinking "outside" a box, you put yourself in another box. I say, know them both.

Yeah. Good think he didn't resign himself to it the, hey? He just said "CAN" think outside that box - the inference is broader horizons, that do not exclude the limited space of the "inside box" thinkers.

[TampaDeveloper]

Originally posted by Brass:
Yeah. Good think he didn't resign himself to it the, hey? He just said "CAN" think outside that box - the inference is broader horizons, that do not exclude the limited space of the "inside box" thinkers.

Oh yeah. Silly me. Nobody's ever been critical of Microsoft, regardless of their current offerings.