>> Before spending some time and putting a programmer at work on
>> extending that code, I'd like to get an idea if it's worth the
>> effort or not.
> I would like to know that, too. How uses the ASP module? If
> not, whats wrong?
We have just finished a e-Commerce site using OpenSA 0.20. It is built using
.ASP pages and the mod-asp. That ASP implementation is a very good start
work, but it is still only a starting work. It misses functionnalities, and
has some bugs.
We worked around the missing functionnalities easily. It was a little bit
more effort to work around the bugs in the Session variables (allowing you
to associate variables with the session state automatically maintained by
the module).
So we decided to manage our sessions by ourselves, through cookies (just
like the ASP Session is implemented btw). The session state is now
maintained directly in our database backend. This means that we are able to
resist crashes of mod-asp ans so of Apache, if any. We are now also able to
use multiple Apache servers (DNS round-robin scheme) to share the load. This
has been very successfully tested though when the site will go on-line in
some days, it will run on a single server.
The ** ONE ** thing trully annoying is that mod-asp does not process by
itself the :
<!--#include file="somefile.inc"--> tags. The MS ASP implementation process
that small subset of mod-include, and it is very handy to share code among
ASP pages. Handling a coherent look between multiple pages is really uneasy
when you can't include portions of ASP code or HTML for headers, footers,
and so on...
I tried to find a way to have mod-include preprocess the pages before
mod-asp sees them, but found no way of doing it. mod-include should be set
to return another mime-type than text/html for this to be possible, at
least. Though, I am not sure if piping of multiple mod-filters like
mod-include THEN mod-asp is even possible with Apache 1.3.x architecture
(?).
We will make some experiments at implementing support of <!--#include --> in
mod-asp as distributed with 1.0.0 source code within the next few days.
Seeing what PHP4 can do, and taking into account that it will now be able to
run as a module, the performance bottleneck due to CGI execution will be a
thing of the past. So we may as well decide to quickly rewrite in PHP4
within the coming weeks.
But the ASP adventure was interesting and could still be interesting.
It is so much pleasure to be able to do ASP pages without being forced to
run MS IIS !
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Olivier Mascia T.I.P. Group SA
[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.tipgroup.com
Director, Chief Software Architect +32 65 401111
