Migrating from ASP to ASP.NET - Active Server Pages: Cons
(Page 2 of 11 )
ASP Web pages are driven by scripting languages such as VBScript, JScript, or even PerlScript. While this provides a rapid development environment, it means that each ASP page must be interpreted (read from top to bottom) each time a client request comes into the Web server. While interpreted code is easy to write (it isn’t compiled), it’s not the most scalable and doesn’t lend itself well to the principles of object-oriented programming (OOP) which have become so popular. Because ASP script code is generally embedded within HTML, the code can also become difficult to read and maintain as pages become more and more complex. ASP developers affectionately refer to this phenomenon as “spaghetti code.”
In addition to these issues, ASP typically requires developers to write a lot of code to perform common tasks such as adding data to a drop-down list or paging through an HTML table that displays customer records. Database records must be programmatically walked through using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) and dynamically injected into HTML code. Although this process is not overly difficult and can be simplified by placing reusable code in include files, it isn’t nearly as simple as it should be. Extending ASP functionality can also be somewhat cumbersome as more advanced functionality must be added through COM components written in languages such as C++ or Visual Basic. These components must be “registered” in the Windows operating system registry in order to be used, which makes deployment to Web servers that much more difficult and error prone. In addition to their reliance on COM, ASP pages have limited caching functionality that can be used to store frequently accessed pieces of information. The lack of caching support doesn’t provide the best environment for building scalable Web sites. Finally, although the availability of sessions in ASP pages can certainly be viewed as a pro due to the ease that state can be stored between client requests to the Web server, ASP session state is stored in-process on the server. This ultimately reduces the scalability of an application and makes it difficult to spread the load across multiple servers found in a Web Farm.
While the cons mentioned here are not meant to detract from the success of ASP, they’re highlighted to illustrate some of the main issues that Microsoft needed to resolve. Rather than resolve these issues through enhancing ASP, they chose a completely different road
with their release of the .NET Framework and ASP.NET.
Next: What is the .NET Framework? >>
More ASP.NET Articles
More By Dada Kalander
/ 47 
