Classic ASP - Any Commercial Advantage?

By John Humpfries

Classic ASP is getting on a bit now, first released back in 1996 as an add on for Windows NT4, it was then included as part of Windows 2000 and has been included as part of IIS since. It went through three major iterations before Microsoft stopped developing it. Although development on it ceased, it formed the foundation for ASP.NET version 1, which was originally called ASP+. Interestingly all these years on you can still code in a Classic ASP style when using ASP.NET i.e. inline amongst your HTML tags if you so choose; and slightly bizarrely ASP.NET Razor actively encourages this coding paradigm, which could be construed as a step backwards by some (Microsoft having successfully separated out business logic from presentation with the advent of ASP.NET).

However, despite being quite old now, that's not to say it is bad. Classic ASP websites can still be very fast ~ particularly considering how many times more powerful server are compared to 10 or 15 years ago. In fact its perfectly feasible for a Classic ASP website to outstrip its compiled ASP.NET brethren for speed in some situations on a modern server in a like for like scenario.

There are obviously other considerations to take into account, it's not just the speed of a given application, but the speed of development is something that is undeniably very different between Classic ASP and ASP.NET. Things that took a day or two in VBScript now take a matter of hours or even minutes thanks to the built in components in the.NET Framework and the 8th wonder of the world that is Visual Studio.

Even though it makes more commercial sense to develop in ASP.NET when even one has the change, there is something quite quaint about Classic ASP: a certain rawness and closeness to nature - if nature was a scripting engine. Yes it takes longer to do things, and no there isn't a built in stringbuilder class, but it can still be very satisfying to code a Classic ASP page in VBScript.

There is something quite pleasing about working with a technology that is now static - it is what it is: if you come back to it after a year it's still the same, unlike other technologies where some new framework or other has come out requiring some degree of learning or manual reading. In some respect it could therefore be said there is still some commercial advantage to this aging technology.

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