[Gambas-user] classic asp and vbscript compatibility

[Benoit Minisini]

On dimanche 10 février 2008, Laxminarayan AB wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> is there an attempt to make vbscript and jscript conversion or run directly
> under gambas?

No, but something very similar is doable. The gb.web component have all the 
methods equivalent to ASP. The only thing that is missing is a support for an 
equivalent of the ASP pages.

>
> What i know so far:
> - compiled gambas 2 from source - works fine
> - saw the excellent set of examples, but gambas web runs as CGI, afaik

A CGI script written in Gambas can beat all bloated ASP.NET applications. 
Tested in reality :-) SO CGI is not really a problem. A support for FastCGI 
would be better.

> - have a long familiarity with MS VB, VB.Net
>
> What i would like to see or do is gambas as an apache module or with a
> native web server to host "ASP" applications. I know that writing a web
> server is not an easy task.

You don't write a web server. You use Apache, or better, thttpd (or lighttpd). 
For just running CGI scripts and serving static contents, thttpd is very 
small and fast.

> I know that Gambas is not aiming to repeat the mistakes of VB. So, maybe
> the VBScript API can be emulated by a wrapper over gb web, just to maintain
> syntax compatiblity. Debugging and other things can be added while
> improving the port. (Or does it need to be designed into new code?)

Real compatibility is a matter of translating the VBScript syntax into Gambas 
syntax. I.e. it would be a sort of converter that would be run before the 
compilation.

Debugging a CGI script is really not easy at the moment. To do that, I need to 
embed a web server into gb.web (thttpd!) so that the Gambas CGI script is 
independent.

Note you don't have to make a program for each page. Your web site should be a 
unique CGI script, a unique Gambas project, will the rendering code of all 
pages inside.

>
> The need for ASP compatibility is that MS is trying to phase out ASP and
> there is a ton of code in ASP. And many users of ASP. MS does not mind
> ditching them or forcing them to learn ASP.Net.
>
> ASP.Net is very slow and bloated. Also, Mono is handling ASP.Net on Linux.
>
> The only other systems that run ASP 3.0 are the SUN Java System Active
> Server Pages or the ActiveHTML component from selisoft.
> The first one is Java, which needs  a J2EE server and the second is a
> closed proprietary extension to ABYSS web server.
> Halcyonsoft's  iASP seems to have gone off the web, untraceably!
>

A VBScript->Gambas translator would be easy I think, more than a VB->Gambas 
translator, as the syntax is less complex. Except for obscure ASP methods, 
and for ActiveX components that are just there to prevent you from escaping 
from Windows.

> I am not very skilled at systems programming, but i'm good at learning
> things. Is this task easy or difficult? I'd be glad if someone gave a quick
> overview od what would be required.
> Also, if anyone is already working on this, there's no need to duplicate
> effort. Other than that, whenever I get the time, I'm willing to help out
> in any other way.

I think I was not very clear, but continue on asking questions if you are 
motivated.

>
> Regards,
> Laxminarayan AB.
>
> PS: gambas IDE and the example set is awesome. Just if we could make the
> IDE a bit more polished, 

Please give more details, as sometimes I don't have the idea to add some very 
easy features. But if you want code folding, you have to wait, wait... :-)

> it would strike a chord with MS Windows RAD users. 
>

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini