Don’t Try This At Home

OK, now that I got that out of the way … what am I doing playing with good old school Classic ASP?

Basically, I’ve been thinking about JScript (Microsoft’s ECMAScript implementation) for awhile. JavaScript is a highly dynamic, relatively awesome language.

So … if we had access to such a great language for server-side web programming with classic ASP, then why did classic ASP suck so bad?

If we could go back in time and, knowing modern-day web development frameworks, start coding classic ASP … would we have made beautiful Rails-like frameworks? Is it even possible?

So, one day in November, after a few beers, I decided to try to implement Rack in classic ASP … and so I did. And I tried to implement the basics of Sinatra … and so I did.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I implemented more of Sinatra as well as the basics of a DataMapper/ActiveRecord-esque ORM.

A few examples:

1 req(uire('rack/rack'));
2 
3 run(function(env){
4   return [ 200, {}, ['You requested path: ' + env.PATH_INFO] ];
5 });

 1 var db  = DB.odbc("an odbc system dsn");
 2 var Dog = db.model("dogs");
 3 
 4 get('/', function(){
 5   return 'Hello from home';
 6 });
 7 
 8 get('/dogs/:name', function(name){
 9   return "You're viewing the dog: " + name;
10 });
11 
12 post('/dogs', function(){
13   var dog = Dog.create(this.params);
14   this.redirectTo('/dogs/' + dog.name);
15 });
16 
17 run(sinatra_app);

If you’re interested in modern server-side JavaScript, there are lots of active projects out there.

Let me know if you’re more interested in server-side JavaScript and I might do some follow-up screencasts on how to use some of the modern tools / frameworks out there.

• CommonJS - basically a spec for the JavaScript “standard library”
• Narwhal - CommonJS implementation with a package management system and a good number of libraries, including Bogart (a sinatra-like framework)
• Jack - basically Rack ported to JavaScript. CommonJS includes a spec for a web server gateway interface (JSGI), which is basically based on Jack.
• node.js - a popular evented web server that runs on v8. You can run typical Rack-like applications on this, but that’s not its intended purpose. It’s all about events.
• nitro - web framework build on top of Narwhal / Jack / Rhino

There’s a lot more too. The most important thing, imho, is CommonJS. Want to write a command-line application in JavaScript? Well … how do you print out to the console or get the passed arguments? All of these things are included in the CommonJS spec. And there are a number of implementations available now!

Anyway, if you want to see what I coded on top of classic ASP (because … why not?), watch the screencast or view the code at:

http://github.com/remi/classic-asp