of ignorance here. I know very
little about Microsoft solutions.
According to this article, it would
seem that you have two choices to
choose from, ASP (the old solution)
and ASP.NET (the new solution).
Here's the article:
Getting Started with ASP.NET
This is an old old article. Looks
like it was published in 2002.
Therefore, it must be quite dated.
However, it does seem to be saying
that there is this well-established
thing called ASP and then there is
this new thing called ASP.NET.
That's a good start. That's what I
understand so far.
Server-Side Versus Client-Side
As I read further into the article,
I see that it is inferred that both
ASP and ASP.NET are server-side, not
client-side.
Server-side versus client-side are
a lot simpler than they sound.
Client-Side simply means that the
program is running on your home
computer, not a web server.
For example, web pages are done
using HTML. HTML is a client-side
phenomena. Why? Because your
web browser figures out what the
HTML is supposed to look like.
The web browser runs on your home
computer. Therefore, anything that
the web browser runs, generally
speaking, is client-side.
Front-End Versus Back-End
In many ways, this parallels the
front end and back-end of a web
site.
Generally speaking, the back-end
of the website runs on your web
server and the front-end of your
website runs on your home computer.
Undoubtedly, someone could come
up with an example where this
might be untrue.
More importantly, though, is the
fact that it is almost always
true that the backend of a web
site runs on the web server that
the web site originates on.
ASP is the Back-End
ASP anything, whether it be
ASP or ASP.NET, is used to
implement the backend of
a website running on an
IIS server.
This is what I've gotten
so far out of this article.
Again, I speak more from
ignorance than from experience.
I have very little experience
with IIS.
ASP.NET Is Based on the
Microsoft .NET Framework
The above title is really a
direct quote from the article.
According to the author of the
article .NET is a framework
that allows you to do website
development in over 20 different
languages.
This is an approach I've not seen
before. Rather than require a
programmer to learn a new language,
let the programmer rely on
the language he or she knows
best.
This seems to be the idea.
I can't help but be a bit
skeptical.
I know the tendency in
programming languages is
that there is just one
language that does it
best.
For example, when C Language
took over the world of
Fortran programming, it would
seem that Fortran pretty
much went away.
There are other examples I can
think of.
Though others might dispute this,
I feel that Perl is still your
best bet for processing and
manipulating raw data as strings.
This is where Perl is so strong.
It's such a wonderful language
for looking for things in files
and then reformatting what's
there or extracting what is there.
Do I need something that lets
me write in 20 different languages?
Well, I don't know. I don't have
enough experience to say.
I'm just getting started with IIS.
Learn ASP First?
One thing that the article has
given me an inclination towards
and that is that maybe I should
learn a little bit about ASP
first before attempting ASP.NET.
I learned C language before I
learned C++ and I feel that this
put me at an advantage.
Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++,
seems to think that learning
C++ before learning straight C
is better.
I'm not so sure about this.
For me, learning the subset
language was probably a better
choice.
I know. I know. I'm way
off-topic.
Learning ASP First
I'm going to experiment with
learning ASP before ASP.NET
and see how it works out.
Ed Abbott
No comments:
Post a Comment