Preparing for Servlet Seminar

[Jay Macarty]

In preparing to present a seminar in October on the use of Java servlets, I will be comparing servlet technology with other forms of server-side processing. One of the comparisons will be between servlets and Active Server Pages, ASP. Because my experience with ASP is somewhat limited, I do not wish to draw a contrast between servlets and ASP which may not actually exist. Therefore, I would very much appreciate any feedback I could get from the list on how ASP compares to servlets in the following areas.   General Questions: 1. Instance Persistence - Does ASP support the concept of persistence across requests or are the pages always re-loaded and interpreted for each client request?   2. Background Processing - Can an ASP page run another process and if so, relating back to question 1, can it execute a given process between client requests. For example, I have a stock quote retrieval servlet that queries a database every 15 minutes and rebuilds the client response data. When a client requests the stock quote report, the servlet simply feeds back the last build instead of rebuilding for each request. Could ASP perform such a task?   3. Servlet Chaining and Filters - Does ASP support the ability to perform these types of tasks?   4. getLastModified() - Does ASP have a way of checking/updating the fact that a given content has been updated or does it assume that the page logic must be run for each request? For example, my stock quote application sets the time the quote was last updated. If a user checks the quotes more than once in the same 15 minute period, getLastModified() will inform the server that the content has not changed.   5. Interservlet Communication - Does ASP provide a way for one page's code to communicate/share information with another page's code?   Multimedia Questions: 1. Image Generation - Does ASP support the ability to generate dynamic image data?   2. Image Composition - If the answer to 1 is yes, can ASP provide the ability to combine images or draw text on top of an existing image?   3. Compressed Content - Servlets can take advantage of Java's data compression utilities to send compressed content back to the client. Does ASP provide a method for accomplishing this task?   Session Tracking Questions: 1. The Session Tracking API - Does ASP provide anything which serves the same functionality as the Session Tracking API?   Security Questions: 1. The Servlet Sandbox - Does ASP provide a way to isolate the executing code of an ASP page from other processes and the server itself?   2. Access Controllers - Does ASP have anything similar to a Java security manager to limit/control executing code at a granular level?   Database Questions: 1.  Connection Pooling - Does ASP have a way of establishing and maintaining a connection pool or does database connection and validation accompany each request?