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Classic ASP revival

If Microsoft wants to stay relevant...

smilie

1:46 am on Dec 20, 2016 (gmt 0)

Posting here , in a very slow forum.

I've been running several classic asp sites since late 1990-ies, when server side vbscript was very popular, one of the more popular languages. One pretty large one, and fairly efficient.

Since then, MS decided , for whatever reason , to kill VBScript, pretty much. No support whatsoever, no libraries, no development. All cards were thrown into a more complex C# and ASP.net. Great for job security, bad for market share.

And yet, the more popular languages of the day today are scripted - Javascript for one. Php took reign from MS's vbscript as THE language for the masses.

If Microsoft wants to stay relevant in the next decade, they IMHO need to reinvent a simple, scripted language "for the masses" and throw a decent publishing platform with it (similar Wordpress), both of which should be extendable.

Why wouldn't they reinvent something that already worked, had tens of thousands of developers and was a simple and dominant language - vbscript / classic ASP?

All they need is to add some decent libraries for mobile etc. (copy better parts of php), buy out some decent publishing platform in classic asp and make it open source. And throw in some bells and whistles.

keyplyr

3:54 am on Dec 20, 2016 (gmt 0)

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MS decided , for whatever reason , to kill VBScript,

Well one reason, as I remember, was the inherent, systemic vulnerability to hacking. MS threw VBScript under the bus and moved on, instead of doing security updates to sustain it.

smilie

4:40 am on Dec 21, 2016 (gmt 0)

Maybe. But they lost the market entirely.

Which market they have not yet lost... IE. Smartphones. Scripting languages. office tools (openoffice is free). Email (gmail and thunderbird are free). Small databases (killed Access, MySQL is eating its lunch).

Vulnerability to hacking? I have a fairly visiting site (10-12K per day at peaks) that I had not seen hacked in years.
What's notorious for hacking is wordpress, 3 tiny wordpress sites were hacked literally every week until I pulled a plug on one of the hosting companies.

Annoying to use all those 3-rd party tools for simple things such as upload controls and image manipulation. And 32767 max for integers? That's really pa-the-tic of MS. And pathetically slow string concatenation.

All of this is easily fixed in 1 release.

smilie

5:37 pm on Dec 28, 2016 (gmt 0)

I take it nobody wants it .

tangor

11:25 pm on Dec 28, 2016 (gmt 0)

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Not so much as don't want it, but don't see much value in supporting/using something that is not being supported/used. Each of the desires listed in the OP are available in other more robust languages. (or for some of us, Perl is still the go to for server side)

smilie

4:04 pm on Dec 29, 2016 (gmt 0)

Perl on Windows? I tried that. I had one website in Perl on Windows (a long time ago it was an Amazon affiliate). It's sl-o-o-o-o-w. And it takes way more resources on Windows box than classic asp site, in fact when Google would hit it in early days, it would go to very high CPU and eat other site's resources too.

Same with C# website. I am running a 10K visitors a day, classic asp site with less resources than 1.5K visitors C# site.

Classic asp is efficient , if you know how to write the code. MS just has to improve it in certain areas, like increase integers size and string concatenation.