Blake--
I think you're going to have to resign yourself to "officially" doing the
project in ASP, and to be quite honest about it, there's really no
compelling reason not to.
The fact that PSU is "an MS shop top to bottom" is a much more compelling
reason than you might think. If you introduce servlets into this culture,
you're forcing anybody coming in after you to learn two paradigms and two
technologies. Let's be quite honest--the infrastructure there is already in
place to support ASP, so arguments of portability will not play out well.
ASP is not an object-oriented language, true, but then again most C++/Java
folks will quickly tell you that neither is Visual Basic, and that's also
true. Neither argument matters one bit, however, if the existing staff is
able to get their work accomplished using such non-OOP technologies, and get
it done quickly and cleanly.
Truth is, and this is a hard truth for many engineers to accept, technology
really doesn't matter. When you boil everything else away, it's the people
and the process behind software development that really drives the success
or failure of a project. There's no reusability in ASP? Not true--you can do
page includes of commonly-reused methods or snippets of code, thereby giving
you the ability to build a "library" of ASP functions, just as you can build
JavaBeans or Java components. ASP isn't an "object-oriented" language?
Unfortunately, objects aren't everything--objects help promote certain
things, but remember that people were building object-oriented applications
in languages like C for years before C++ came along. (Talk to any
XWindows/Motif programmer.) And what's more, ASP builds off of COM, which is
in of itself an object-oriented environment--build your middle-tier
components in VB or VC++ using COM, and use ASP to drive them.
That having been said, however, it doesn't answer your question, which was a
request for help in convincing the boss to investigate, at least, the use of
servlets. Contrary to your boss' opinion, servlets aren't ASP, servlets are
more like ISAPI plug-ins. ASP is an ISAPI plug-in that filters the HTML for
ASP code and executes it before sending it back to the server; the Java
Server Pages servlet does the same for JSP code on a servlet-compliant
server. What you're really looking for here, then, is some need for an ISAPI
plug-in within your application, and then to point out how ISAPI components
must be developed in C++ (sorry, VB and MSJava simply cannot do it, because
ISAPI relies heavily on pointer-based interfaces). Had you been using
servlets, on the other hand, you could have developed the servlet in the
higher-level Java language, which probably will reduce development time, as
well as complexity.
One use for an ISAPI component is filtering HTML pages to perform some
useful step, like the prepending or appending of header or footer HTML, or
the verification of HREFs on a page. ASP (and JSP, for that matter) can't do
this because they *are* the page. This filtering can also be for security
purposes, to screen out any information that might not be acceptable to the
recipient of the HTML content. ASP can't do this, either.
Additionally, ISAPI can do full redirection of a client to another machine,
thereby gaining a certain amount of clustering/load-balancing support. For
example, an ISAPI component can receive the request, ping other servers in
the cluster for their workload, and redirect the request to the server with
the lowest load. ASP can't do this, because ASP (1) is loaded within the
page, so it would turn into an entirely new request and thus visible to the
user, and (2) can't directly query the other machines since VBScript doesn't
permit the calling of Win32 APIs directly, so a COM component would need to
be there in-between to facilitate the redirection.
This is not, by far, an exhaustive list of ISAPI possibilities. What's more,
everything ISAPI can do, servlets can also do, in some cases more easily
owing to Java's higher-level construction.
Hope this helps.
Ted Neward
Patterns/C++/Java/CORBA/EJB/COM-DCOM spoken here
http://www.javageeks.com/~tneward
"I don't even speak for myself; my wife won't let me." --Me
-----Original Message-----
From: Blake Buzzini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 10:29 AM
Subject: Talking Boss into Servlets?
>I program for the PSU College of Engineering, which is an MS shop top to
>bottom. I'm going to be programming a very large, entirely dynamic
>server-side application which will need to do things like image processing
>and writing GIFs back to the client. My boss wants to use ASP. Any
>suggestions on how I can talk him into servlets? He just wrote me, after
>reading WebReview's excerpt of Jason's book, saying that servlets are just
>"Java's implementation of ASP", so we might as well use ASP. Oy.
>
>Thanks,
>Blake
>
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