Re: ASP / FrontPage Extensions

[jproy@world.std.com (John P Roy)]

The list of servers for which microsoft provides frontpage extensions
is available from MS. The key to understand here is that MS will not
publish the source for thier extensions and so the only servers
which can support FP are those which MS has provided extensions for. This
is one reason I never looked into FP much. 

Another is that FP is just not a good implementation from an
architectural standpoint - folks at w3c have developed a great 
and extensible protocol with HTTP methods like PUT, DELETE, MOVE etc.
for support of remote site maintainence and trully interactive 
web website. The MS FP implementation uses a proprietary protocol
(vermeer encoding) where everything is sent via method POST - a
IMHO shortsighted non-portable and ugly implementation under what
is a very shinny user interface.

So FP extensions for Pi3Web would be a real hack (like FP extensions
themselves) and would involve emulating the ORA server on Win32 and
Apache on UNIX. Possibly this still might have value given the 
ground-swell of FP users- however I would rather wait for an open
interface to site maintainence/publishing, just because all work
on support for FP would be throw-away.

About ASP's, I don't think Pi3Web suuprots the version of ISAPI where
ASP.dll could be used, it might not be a whole lot of work. 

If I wanted to access a DB from Pi3Web, I would use perl CGI
scripts and access the DB using Win32::ODBC package, though naturally
there are other options.

Later,
John

> 
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know which servers support ASP?  I read a book that says only
> Microsoft and O'reilly web servers support it.  If this is true, then what
> about frontpage extensions?  I mean, since to use frontpage extensions, you
> need ASP, does that mean only MS and O'reilly web servers can use frontpage
> extensions?  
> 
> Separate question, so what is the standarad way to access a database for
> web pages?  Through CGI's?
>