on 1/26/01 1:36 AM, Richard Lynch at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> If there are some things you really need to hide, and perhaps also really
>> need to make fast, then write yourself a PHP extension in C that
> I dunno... Once you start writing chunks of it in C code, it doesn't really
> seem like a script to me...
>...
> But at that point, it starts to look a lot more like a C program with some
> interface widgets in PHP, rather than a PHP script really.
Actually Microsoft does exactly just this with Active Server Pages. Most
of the functionality in Active Server Pages are done through dynamically
loaded component libraries (ActiveX/COM). It works fairly well as you can
get some high quality commercial components. But it does hurt too because
you don't have very much built into ASP itself (in fact, very little is.
Almost everything is COM) and you find that ASP + default COM may be missing
some key stuff you might need (like file opens on URLs, file upload, etc)
and is built into PHP.
Microsoft does offer one thing over the "chunk of C code". COM can be
written in Visual Basic and even VBScript encased XML (though why anyone
would want to do this would have me a bit confused as ASP is written in
VBScript). I'd imagine you could write COM very easily in C# which is a lot
like Java. So there are a lot more options right now as well as better
developer tools (and support). But you pay for it. ;-)
Most people don't create COM. Most people purchase them or use the
default COM that Microsoft provides (A file system object, a browser object,
a database object, etc.). There are also a lot of stuff that might as well
be "default COM" because they're part of a product that everyone installs in
their computer (for instance, an XML parser, or Excel's ability to render
graphs), these too can be instantiated from within ASP.
All this causes interesting problems when the developer goes out of
business or decided to stop supporting it.
(Side note: Apparently PHP for Windows can instantiate COM. I'd imagine
most of the ASP2PHP translator would depend on this fact?)
Take care,
terry
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terry chay, Director of Engineering, <http://www.QIXO.com/>
QIXO /kick.so/ - Integrating Many Travel Web Sites Into One
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