At 20:11 20-09-98 +0100, David Meadows wrote:
>You miss my point. I will accept that Perl 
may be "nicer to use" or "better for the programmer" 
(which is what you seem to be saying), but I was 
>talking about functionality. 

Perhaps a most fundamental aspect of functionality is portability.

As a Web site creator, or as a Web site providing organization, it can be
important to be able to choose a service provider from a broad assortment.

With many and varied perl solutions, I can (with only a scant amount of
care) be able to port to a variety of server options. I can make selections
based on performance, robustness, net connectivity, and cost.

That important functionality is critical to many projects. Being locked
into a single "sole source" is considered by many to be a bad decision,
both technically and from a business perspective.

To suggest that ASP meets certain requirements is easy to do.  Whether it
is a niche market, or part of the main stream, might well be open to
debate... but hopefully rather on a *.advocacy discussion list (so many of
us can avoid it).

Consider, just one thing, that the percent of major public Web servers
using a platform other than Windows is _substantially_ greater than for
computer sales overall. We may not be able to generalize a great deal from
this, but we can say with considerable confidence that reasons other than
ActiveX Scripting prompted the choice. [0]

>At the end of the day, both will let you do 
>exactly that same thing (I think). The fact 
>that Perl will let you do that thing in  a
>variety of ways is neither here nor there.

They may do similar things, possibly the same way. But typically in quite
different ways. With quite different demands on resources (production and
development and maintenance). These differences are not only present, are
not only important, can be quite different, but in some cases so much so
that they can make or break a project.

>OK, it's not as rigid as I thought then. I thought your only
>option was to rewrite the script (which makes for a
>maintenance nightmare).

Please, "thinking" is a cognitive process, involving the accumulation and
assessment of facts and information, preceding any decision making. In this
context, perhaps "presume" would be more descriptive.

>Nooo... Microsoft can't stick with the same terminology for
>more than 10 minutes ;-)

Oh, c'mon... I've seen them stay consistent within the same 30 minute
presentation. <g> Not to suggest between presentations at the same day's
dog-and-pony show, however. <g>

>So, ActiveX scripts run in a browser or on a server. When they
>run on a server, they can call the Internet Services
>Applications Programming Interface (ISAPI), or they can call
>distributed ActiveX objects (DCOM), or they can call ActiveX
>Data objects (ADO) or they can access databases through open
>database connectivity (ODBC) and basically when you put it all
>together you get an active server page (ASP) to send to the
>client [you want acronyms? I got acronyms!].
>
>Anyway, that's how I *think* it works.

As an overview, you've at least illustrated a portion of the alphabet soup
of complexity involved in the process. <g> An alternative to simplicity, too.


As to how it "works," many of us are concerned that a postfixed period on
a URL was "how it works" at one time. And then postfixing "::$DATA" onto a
URL was "how it works." Such "undocumented features," quite likely known to
those without a "need to know" long before they are known to the rest of
us. A particularly scary concept, to say the least.

/Harold
===============
[0] Let's not forget that the DCOM and ActiveX technologies do predate the
Web... Microsoft had something they called DDE, which made a lot of
promises, and did deliver on some of them, then Microsoft introduced
something they called OLE, which made a lot of promises, and did deliver on
some of them, then Microsoft introduced something they called OLE-2, which
made a lot of promises, and did deliver on some of them, then Microsoft
introduced something they called ActiveX, which made a lot of promises, and
did deliver on some of them. By adding enough additional complexity, each
time around, they do seem sincere in their belief that the latest is the
greatest, but for the rest of us, some skepticism exists that this time
they got it right this time.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Harold A. Driscoll                       mailto:harold(at)driscoll.chi.il.us
#include <std/disclaimer>      http://homepage.interaccess.com/~driscoll/

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