Is ASP out-of-date?

Good morning

“Out of date” is quite difficult to define;

I am mainly a desktop developer and only very recently did one of my clients move away from an application based on COBOL/SCO Unix on a PC Server/Terminal Emulators on PCs.  The main reason was not that the business needs couldn’t be fulfilled but that future of SCO Unix was/is very unsure.

In terms of development, the WebWiz forum licence allows for a single copy on your PC for test, and I find that I can run my copy using Visual Studio 2008 and it’s debugger to single step through the asp so it clearly isn’t obsolete in this respect. I haven’t tried VS 2010 as I hate it!

Microsoft stopped Classic ASP development a while ago, but like VBA there is so much code around that intentionally making it unavailable soon doesn’t seem likely. However I can easily imagine something happening in the future that makes Classic ASP incompatible with “the latest release” of IIS or less likely SQL Server and MS saying you can’t upgrade from IIS12 or SQL Server 2014. If this were to happen it is time to throw resource at asp.Net or whatever the flavour of the month is then.

If you are not hosting your forum with Webwiz I could see hosting difficulties in the future, especially with the large hosting companies, simply because it is easier for the host to say we don’t support new customers who want to use Classic ASP and lose very little new business.

However I can see some drawbacks for a Classic ASP product. I have an asp.Net site, but I am not working on it full time and I want a forum, so there are a lot of benefits to paying for a one, modifying it and having it part of the site.  This language difference means that I am not modifying the forum very much, certainly not as much as I would have done if it were asp.Net, so I am no contributing much to pool of User Modifications, nor is my knowledge as great as it could be to help with forum queries.

Also if you accept that a move to asp.Net is inevitable then adding and changing the Classic ASP product is more work that will have to be converted. Asp.Net is about 12 years old now, so it is not inconceivable that a replacement either from Microsoft or elsewhere is around the corner. As a desktop developer I am surprised at how hard it is to develop applications that have a browser based (stateless) display in comparison with the desktop (stated). (Mods please feel to delete this link if you want to.) Have a look at www.SimpleServiceCentre.co.uk to see what I mean by an application.

I’m guessing here, but I expect that many people initially choose their forum based on “what they know”, “What a friend will set up for them” and if neither of these options “who will set it up and run it for them and at what price”.  The language and database probably won’t enter too much into the decision,

Personally I think that PHP is more obsolete (rather than out of date) than Classic ASP because it is an Open Source project, in theory Open Source projects are more open to change than a proprietory technology, but in practice they seem to be less open to new ways of doing things. 

PHP will continue to evolve and develop even when it hits, or in my view already has hit, along with asp.NET, the point where it there is a need for a radical rethink. Asp.Net went with Silverlight as its solution to application development in browsers, this is a proprietory, PHP needs something similar.  HTML 5 is nowhere enough. The trouble with Silverlight is that it hardly something that you can assume will be available outside of intranets.

And if this doesn't start the thread going off topic.....

Bye

Ian