> I must confess that my original concern seems to be so
> adequately captured by Dave Watts' insight into how Microsoft
> operates. Yes the market for web application servers is
> competitive, and for someone (like myself) who keeps falling
> back on CF as a prefered development platform, reading Richard
> Anderson et al. 's A Preview of Active Server Pages+ (Wrox)
> left me a little concerned about whether or not CF developers
> will be left behind when ASP.NET becomes a reality. That's
> why I was wondering if anyone knew what future versions of
> CF had to offer in the face of ASP.NET's code/content
> separation, easier extensibility, and its integration with
> .NET web services.
I haven't read that book, and I'm not fully familiar with the proposed
feature set for ASP+ or its replacement ASP.NET, so I don't know how well I
can answer this.
However, I can tell you I've had this argument before. It was a couple of
years ago, when ASP became available in beta. ASP was going to take over the
world because it provided easy extensibility through COM, easy integration
with other MS products (again through COM), and an easy way to separate
presentation logic from business logic (yet again through COM - building
components for business logic and gluing those components together with
ASP). I remember hearing from the time how CF would soon be obsolete.
At the time (the CF 2-3 product cycle, if I recall correctly), I was a bit
worried, but not that much, and I stuck with CF, because it let me do my
work more quickly.
Now, of course, ASP is out, and it's been very successful. CF is still out
and quite successful itself, though, demonstrating that even in the Windows
world, there's room for more than one web application server platform.
As for ASP.NET versus CF 5, I suspect that things will work out similarly to
how they did with ASP 1-3 versus CF 2-4. ASP will be the platform of choice
for Windows programmers who would otherwise do VB/C++/C# and COM programming
(which is what you need to make use of that "easier extensibility"), and CF
will be the platform of choice for web developers who want to minimize
development and maintenance time without wedding themselves at the hip to
the MS technology du jour.
> By the way, that remark about "vaporware" understates the
> extent of ASP.NET availability. A few web hosts are already
> offering hosting with that option installed, some of them
> for free.
That's true. I just got Visual Studio.NET Beta 1 today from MSDN. Of course,
any code that I wrote with it, I wouldn't be able to deploy for a client.
>From that perspective - the one that counts, in my opinion - .NET is not yet
a real product.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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