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Scripting Alternatives

I have a Web application to write for a Windows 2000 Web server. Is there any point in writing it in anything but Active Server Pages (ASP)?

Chi Colberg

There can be plenty of good reasons to use other systems. Mind you, there are plenty of good reasons to use ASP too. ASP is on every Windows NT and 2000 Web server with Internet Information Server (IIS) installed. ASP is well understood and widely supported; there are many third-party development tools and zillions of third-party COM objects to use with it, and odds are that the company that makes it won't be going out of business anytime soon.

That said, you should consider writing in something else if you might want to move the application to another type of server. You might, for example, want to develop on your own Windows server (or even Windows 2000 Pro) but deploy your application on a hosted server that could be running anything. Hosted Windows NT and Windows 2000 sites are not hard to find, but Linux-based servers are far more prevalent and cheaper. The vast majority of these hosting services offer the PHP scripting language and MySQL database.

There are Windows versions of PHP and MySQL, although neither is used all that widely. You could set these up on your Windows systems, work with them there, and deploy them on Linux servers relatively easily. There can be differences between the Linux and Windows implementations of MySQL and (especially) PHP; for example, many PHP extensions are written with Unix-specific code and won't run under Windows. We've seen many problems using PHP version 4 under Windows, especially with the ISAPI version, but these may have been fixed by now. Visit www.php4win.de, a site dedicated to users of PHP on Windows. If you're planning on doing real work on PHP under Windows, exploring the site and subscribing to the mailing list are well worth the effort.

Java Server Pages (JSP) is another option for server-side scripting, and it interfaces well with server-side Java. There are many commercial implementations, but Tomcat, the reference implementation, is highly regarded and free. The good news is that your code should run fine on any operating system, assuming you're careful about things like filenames. Even the Java should be binary-compatible between platforms, which is quite a bit more convenient than extensions to PHP and COM objects in ASP. But JSP is not widely supported in less expensive hosting environments, so it's less appealing as an alternative.

ColdFusion, from Macromedia (formerly Allaire) is another popular scripting environment that supports many server platforms. You can write the code in any text editor, but Macromedia's first-rate development environment, ColdFusion Studio, is Windows-only. There are many hosting services that offer ColdFusion, but it often costs more. In addition to being an excellent language with a wonderful development environment, especially for database development, ColdFusion has the best support you can find for third-party interaction through interfaces like COM, CORBA, EJB, and so on.

Finally, there are still a lot of people who write Web sites in Perl, the granddaddy of Web scripting languages. Perl on Windows used to be a second-rate product, but it's a first-class implementation now, and you can write sites that port smoothly between platforms, once again assuming you're careful about things like filenames. And you can assume that almost any server you'll run on will have Perl on it.

For more information on scripting languages, see "From Script to Database," which appeared in our issue of December 11, 2001.