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Is ASP dead?
by : Atrax

With the ascendance of ASP.NET, is ASP really a waning star in the galaxy of web development options? Atrax attempts to address the issue from the standpoint of the pragmatic, jobbing web developer.

For Infinitemonkeys' 100th ASP article, I'd like to take a look back at ASP as it's been and how it will be in the future. Active Server Pages has been a phenomenal framework for web development, popular, powerful, easy to learn. Maligned and celebrated in equal measure, ASP has been, if nothing else, a phenomenal success story for the Microsoft Empire. Had ASP been stillborn in version 1.0, IIS may never have made to its current status as a truly viable enterprise class web server. Call this hyperbole if you will, but let's not forget that IIS was initially very much an afterthought in the NT world. Until the appearance of Windows 2000 and IIS5.0, IIS was an add-on product, even an afterthought. Now, with the release of Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, IIS has truly come of age, being essentially the core of an entire OS edition.

So what place does ASP have in this brave new web-facing world now that ASP.NET has hit version 1.1, and therefore in the minds of the many, an acceptable level of maturity?

To answer this question, we have to examine a couple of issues facing the Microsoft platform as a web server. The first which comes to mind is obviously the enormous inertia inherent in ASP's own success. There are literally millions of websites on the web today created wholly or in part with Active Server Pages. This statistic, rough as it is, is indisputable. Now, how many of these sites will be prepared, or even able, to upgrade their codebase to ASP.NET? Well, a proportion of them, especially those with big budgets, have already done so, others have done so purely because they're technology oriented, and so have a vested interest in being 'cutting edge'. Others have been upgraded on the advice of consultants out for the clever buck, of course. How could it be different in our industry? Some have even been upgraded on the 'panic factor' - A new framework appears, an assumption is made 'ASP is dead' and the next thing you know a client is being essentially fleeced for thousands of dollars on an upgrade which is essentially needless. Say what you like, this happens. Selling a software product is 90% hype and 10% implementation. Building it, of course, is a different matter, and the fog of hype can lead to the wrong road.

You see, I've had a word.

At a recent MVP meeting here in Sydney I had a good old chat with our new (well, new-ish) Developer Evangelist. We talked competition, we talked legacy code and we talked .NET 1.1. We also talked, briefly, about the future of 'classic' ASP (though how it can be called 'classic', I'm not sure - it's taken 32 years for my car to get that designation)

Here's a key point. ASP.NET is not able, even slightly, to compete with PHP. PHP has a massive installed base on platforms which are essentially free, and to rub in the salt PHP is absurdly easy for a relative beginner to pick up and run with. ASP.NET, in contrast, takes some knowledge - it's strongly typed and object oriented, two concepts which are not necessarily easy for a novice to wrap his or her head around. ASP, however, has a lower adoption boundary, and therefore remains the tool with which Microsoft can maintain some sort of parity with PHP, despite the fact that both ASP and ASP.NET run on a relatively expensive OS. Sure, the Webserver is 'easier' to configure than Linux/Apache, but for an end-user or small-time web developer, this rarely, if ever, becomes an issue.

ASP.NET is a superb framework to go up against enterprise frameworks like JSP. Therefore, the math is easy to calculate. Big site, big requirements, big budget, big framework. Small site, small requirements, small budget, smaller framework. It's a question of market segmentation, and look at it this way - if you were in charge of Microsoft's web server division, would you really hand PHP (and therefore similar products) the entry-level* web scripting market on a silver platter? Hands up who said yes. I see few hands. I certainly wouldn't. You'd have to be crazy, or at least an extremely committed Marxist.

Of course, this means that all those ASP developers who left what they thought was a sinking ship for the bigger, brighter world of ASP.NET may well have been making a great decision, but perhaps their motives and rationale were wrong. ASP is still very much a valid framework. Microsoft knows it, a certain proportion of developers are aware of it, if a little uneasy. Most of your clients however, may be dazzled by the hype and therefore they may be confused about what's actually best. This may help; One of the reassuring pieces of information that came from my conversation with our Evangelist friend was that not only is ASP going to be supported (and I quote) "for a few more versions of IIS at least", but there are also improvements being discussed even now. Of course, you can forget improvements which bring ASP closer to ASP.NET - that would be counter to the strategy - however performance tweaks are certainly touted, which can only be a good thing. You won't get built-in image manipulation, but you might get improved caching capabilities and lower memory overhead, perhaps even improved recovery and error handling options, though it's almost certain no changes will be made which will require re-writes of your scripts as they stand now.

Now, don't get me wrong. The idea you've probably garnered so far is that I'm a .NET skeptic. I'm obviously against .NET for some reason, right? Not at all. I'm actively developing ASP.NET code for several areas where ASP.NET seems the best platform. I'm hardly biased against it, despite what I've said in the past based on the BETA and 1.0 versions of the framework. I'm fully aware that the .NET framework is a well considered, fully-featured framework with clear advantages in context. I'm just not willing to re-invent the wheel where it's not justified. I have a pretty good ASP3.0 code library which I can use for the benefit of myself and my clients, and if that's the best way for the situation, I'll go with it. I really don't care what some guy on usenet says - I'll choose a solution based on the requirements and options as they stand, not on partially-defined hype.

So the conclusion is clear. If you have a project coming up which requires a pretty quick build with low to medium performance and functionality requirements but a need for the codebase to last, say, three to four years, you could do worse than to go with ASP3.0. After all, as things stand now, the next version of Windows is as-near-as-certain to include ASP3.x support, and after all, there are a lot of installations still running on NT4, which says a lot for inertia. At worst, in three years Windows Server 2003, which includes ASP 3.0 support, will still be a viable platform. Three years is a long time. Like as not I'll still have several Windows 2000-based clients sitting around by then - after all, I know of several still on NT4 in these days of 2003 Server. Lagging a version or two behind is certainly not a crime when it fits in with a good cost/benefit analysis. If you can't figure this out for yourself, don't try and take a job in management, please.

Of course, this is not to say that ASP.NET isn't your best option. But the decision, as things stand, should not be based on a perception that ASP is essentially dead, because it certainly is not.

And to close : ASP is destined for the scrap heap, but so is everything. ASP.NET is destined for the dumpster. So is Java. It's all going to fall by the wayside in the same way our distant ancestors abandoned flint tools for bronze. It's just a matter of deciding how useful the tool is for the job, and ASP is still a very capable tool indeed, in the right situation. Sometimes a rock is more useful than a screwdriver.

Atrax

*PHP evengelists take note - I'm only saying PHP is easy for beginners, I'm NOT saying it's incapable of large-scale deployment, OK? I don't want to waste time answering your emails over this!

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