what's your opinion of .net for web apps

[k2]

i've got a funny arguement going on firingsquad right now and i figured, this would be a good place to get a resonable conversation going on .net.

personally, i dislike it because i think it's bloated and i do not like how it handles resources and takes a lot of the tier2 work to the client; nor that it's basically single threaded.

i prefer to keep the work in the database and use the web only for display, not processing data. i think middleware (c/perl) is where you should take data to be manipulated if need be.

[znaps]

I don't know .NET, only Java. Does .NET have no equivalent of Java Servlets? I agree, that your data processing and logic should be on the middle layer as much as possible. Embedding all that logic within asp/jsp pages quickly turns into a maintenance nightmare.

[k2]

i'm not sure, i'm never worked with java.

[spankers]

At the risk of being called a Luddite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite) I'd have to say that the web has gone down hill since the early days at CERN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cern). This page (http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html) is an example of great web design.

Who needs web apps anyway? ;)

[znaps]

Sorry, Servlets are like cgi scripts, with a few advantages over traditional cgi, written in Java. I would have thought that since Microsoft copied a lot of the good stuff from Java when they released .NET, that they would have given us something like the equivalent of Servlets also.

Then again, they would want their VB and ASP developers to migrate over to .NET easily so maybe that's why they didn't provide a new technology for the server side.

[k2]

well, most of my web work is asp (98%) and we were going to migrate to .net because the ms docs pimped it rather well to me. after working with it for 2 weeks and getting my code ported, we decided to drop it completely; it wasn't cost effective and it actually slowed down execution and raised the resouces usage.

(all of my asp coding is typed by hand, and it all uses the undocumented tricks MS left out of the docs, including syntax that is more c like than vb, even though it's vbs. i wish i could use jscript but it has to be usable for other people that occasionaly see it)

i found this recent article to cover my gripes and informed me about parts of the framework i hadn't touched. it can't be a good thing when a main supporter decides that .net is not worthwhile.

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/

[llbbl]

.NET for web apps sucks balls. ASP is a cheap nockoff of PHP. Do you have $50k to spend on database + OS + .NET archecture. With a LAMP configuration you can achieve something that works better at a much lower cost.

.NET is good for programming windows applications that is about it.

[llbbl]

I'm sorry to hear you have to work in ASP.

[llbbl]

Java ?? yuk shoot me now :P

[k2]

dude, php came a couple of years after asp; for the most part it's great. it plugs into pgsql/mssql/oracle just fine and in my opinion is a great alternative to asp/ms. i find .net mimics php's pear / mysql (incestous) relationship. the attempt at oop is extremely dumb.

using mono (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page) removes the ms platform from your .net application which is pimp, but it's still .net which is not pimp.

[llbbl]

ok so what maybe ASP came first :)

ASP = egg
PHP = chicken

Chicken is more useful

[k2]

yeah, but the chicken is turning into the hen (.net) which is baaaaaaaaad.

[llbbl]

Hey you are wrong anyways! check it out hahaha!

PHP was originally designed as a small set of Perl scripts, followed by a rewritten set of CGI binaries written in C by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to display his résumé and collect some data, such as how many hits it was generating. Others first used "Personal Home Page Tools" in 1995, when Lerdorf had combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php

ASP 1.0 (distributed with IIS 3.0) on December 10, 1996, ASP 2.0 (distributed with IIS 4.0) in March of 1998, ASP 3.0 (distributed with IIS 5.0)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages

[k2]

i do love php's usefulness; it's extremely versatile and i hope to one day get my corp work off the ms platform and onto it.

[llbbl]

How much u want to bet that MS stole PHP in 1995 and took a year to make their own version ASP in 1996.

[k2]

well snap. i didn't come across php until 96, which is when it roughly started getting good.

[k2]

i'd believe that, ms is pretty lame.

[llbbl]

Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002.

woohooo for wikipedia :P

[llbbl]

i hope to one day get my corp work off the ms platform and onto it.

I wish you luck my friend. Such a task is a significant endeavor. I suggest you write up a detailed plan of what it would take to make the switch and call a meeting with all the bosses to talk about it.

I think I have provided some useful tools of compairson on this site for you. I would have to look for the threads thou.

Also get started with Linux at home ASAP if you haven't already so you can be familar with setting up crap for your office when it comes time to do so. Don't present the plan without a good understanding of what it would take on the Linux side, I am trying to say.

[llbbl]

oh i hope i didn't offend you about the whole ASP thing btw ... eheh ... you asked for my opinion and i gave it lols

[k2]

hehe i've been playing with linux for almost 10yrs now; the site i work for would be on php already if the company that got the contract first wasn't an MS whore. we have every intention of dropping windows when HP starts supporting linux on their servers. going to stay with mssql server though, it's supah fine, although 2005 looks like it's going to be heavy on the .net lameness.

our webcode can be changed to any language extremely easily, that's the joys of not going .net; i just change the function file, and rewrite 5 webpage sections considing of 5-10 files and we're flipped.

(i love rewrites for that reason .. small amount of files = great for management)

[k2]

speaking of HP, I believe they offer SuSE as an OS option for some of their servers. someday... '(

[llbbl]

IBM is also linux friendly :) Dell offers RH, but no AMD yet ;(

HP at least has AMD chips.

[k2]

yup, my db server is a dl145 with the scsi module. it's a sick sick box; the hp guys in hongkong installed win2000 on it at my request (no small feat).

[llbbl]

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantdl145/

The ProLiant DL145 is optimized for the High Performance Computing (HPC) market. Designed and engineered with industry-leading performance features in mind, the DL145 supports AMD Opteron™ 200 Series processors with on-board memory controllers running at the speed of the processor, up to 16GB of 2-way interleaved PC2700 memory, an embedded dual-channel Gbit NIC, a 133 MHz PCI-X I/O expansion slot, and support for 2 non-hot plug ATA or SCSI drives. The 1U size, low power consumption, and support for dual Opteron processors provide HPC customers with a high-performance, low-cost, density optimized solution.

Damn i wish we had that instead of this POS dell crap we bought.

[llbbl]

Here is what i WANTED to get.

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/opteron/326_more_info.html

[znaps]

i found this recent article to cover my gripes and informed me about parts of the framework i hadn't touched. it can't be a good thing when a main supporter decides that .net is not worthwhile.

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/


Yeah, I read that article last week. Why he thinks that MS need to rewrite office in C# to show that .NET is viable is beyond me though. No business would consider doing that.

[llbbl]

ddj rules. i miss reading that magazine.

My opinion is that Avalon, or more specifically, XAML, will mark the death of ASP. The reason is that Avalon is a client-side technology, but the browser is an important part of the distribution model. XAML is so rich that a browser-contained XAML application will look no different to a process-based Avalon application, and coupled with Web Services or Indigo (as the mechanism to access remote code), an XAML application will make an ASP.NET application look paltry and antiquated. Why would Microsoft want to kill ASP? Well, with installation of ASP.NET Microsoft sells a single copy of Windows 2003 and perhaps a handful of copies of Visual Studio.NET. The clients don't have to be Windows, so there is no extra sale to Microsoft (whether as a product or licence). This is hardly a great revenue generator, and worse, ASP.NET actually makes it easy to write the application so that it can be used by browsers other than IE. However, with a technology like XAML Microsoft gets to control the client. So in addition to the server and the development tools, the client must have Avalon. That could be a huge revenue generator for Microsoft, assuming that customers could be persuaded to upgrade to Longhorn. However, Microsoft's announcement that Avalon will be available for other versions of Windows indicates to me that they are not so confident on the uptake of Longhorn, and developers will not write applications for Avalon if they are not convinced that there will be the clients that will run it.

that is the best paragraph relating to this thread

[k2]

looks just like the dl145 TechnoGeek. they're solid machines (either), we have the 250 setup (2.4ghz) and it's insane how much it can do. the other day when it was working hard it was doing 3 trillion transactions a second without peaking out the cpu fully.