Computers & Development SquallBSR on 10 Jun 2007 10:41 am
Development Woes regarding ASP
I have been recently reminded how much I despise classic ASP on the windows platform. I guess it is mainly because ASP is just a glorified VB Script, there are a fair amount of things that you can do with it, however it just doesn’t feel like a well rounded web programming language.
Case 1: Trying to interface with MySQL requires myODBC, which isn’t all that great to begin with, I am unable to use certain stored procedures (which is the proper way to interact with a database) because of a bug in the drivers.
Case 2: ASP is procedural based, it is impossible to wrap your database in an object based abstraction layer, which is the way I prefer to develop. I learned Object Oriented, used OO almost exclusively in the past 6 years. ASP is really only good when you have 1 or 2 tables that need data added to them, etc. However Ruby on Rails would be able to do that trick in about 5 minutes of code compared to 20 in ASP.
Case 3: It only officially runs on Windows. When there are so many more options to choose from that do not tie your development to only one platform. Especially with how distrustful Microsoft is getting, with things like their genuine advantage and other trusted platform (a.k.a treacherous platform) modules.
Case 4: The ASP platform has been left in the dust for ASP.NET, which is like night in day when comparing the quality of the development platform. ASP.NET still suffers a little from Case 3, however with the Mono Project by Novell and the rest of the open source world, it isn’t as big of an issue.
With these non-comprehensive thoughts on why I hate ASP, I leave you with something that every web developer should look at, test and embrace: Ruby on Rails.