## Introduction to Apache::ASP

### By: Joshua Chamas

published in PerlMonth.com in 1999

I was first drawn to Active Server Pages (ASP) as a web development platform a couple years ago when researching how to best develop the NODEWORKS web site. I needed something maintainable, powerful, fast, portable, and of course perl.

Microsoft had developed the ASP standard as the end all to web application development, which promised to be maintainable, powerful, and fast. But support for perl under PerlScript was shoddy, VBScript, ASP's native tongue, seemed a pathetic alternative, and an NT/IIS solution lacks a certain portability. Thus I was led to developing Apache::ASP, which runs under Doug MacEachern's mod_perl for Apache.

### Maintainable

I had been doing CGI style web applications for a couple of years already, and had never been quite satisfied with the CGI programming, growing less so as the HTML I was working with became increasingly more complex than the CGI it was embedded in. The idea of embedding the scripting within the flow of the HTML seemed like a more natural fit over time. This natural flow speaks to the heart of maintainability, where another developer can pick up your code and get a feel for it on the first read.

Check out the difference in how it feels to embed the HTML in the scripting, versus embedding the scripting in the HTML. A reasonably complex table, which is structurally HTML heavy, only touches the tip of the iceberg:

SOME
DATA
TO
LOOP
OVER
:)

Coding this table in CGI, you might get:

    use CGI qw/:standard *table/;
    my(@data) = ('Some', 'Data', 'To', 'Loop', 'Over', ':)');
    print
      header,
      start_html('Example'),
      start_table({-border=>2, -bgcolor=>'blue'}),
      Tr,td,
      start_table({-border=>4, -bgcolor=>'white'})
      ;

    # pretend we are reading from database cursor, so code
    # would be written like so
    my($data, $count);
    while(@data) {
        if($data and $count++ % 2) {
    	print end_table,td,start_table({-border=>4, -bgcolor=>'white'});
        }
        $data = shift @data;
        print Tr({align=>CENTER},
    	     [td([uc($data)."\n"])]
    	    )
          ;
    }

    print
      end_table,
      end_table,
      end_html
      ;

When designing the above table ASP style, a much more natural flow to the script takes form, wherein the developer can literally see the table in table layout of the page:

    <% my(@data) = ('Some', 'Data', 'To', 'Loop', 'Over', ':)'); %>
    <html>
    <head><title>Example</title></head>
    <body>
    <table border=2 bgcolor=blue>
    <tr><td>
    	<table border=4 bgcolor=white>
    	<%
    	my($data, $count);
    	while(@data) {
    	    if($data and $count++ % 2) {
    		%>
    		</table><td><table border=4 bgcolor=white>
    		<%
    	    }
    	    $data = shift @data;
    	    %>
    	    <tr><td><%=uc $data%></td></tr>
    	    <%
    	}
    	%>
    	</table>
    </td></tr>
    </table>
    </body>
    </html>

Doesn't the HTML-centric ASP read better? You'll see that this becomes more true as the html of your site becomes increasingly complex.

There are other aspects to maintainability, like who will be taking over your code in 2 years. With perl CGI, you can assume that any perl developer that you work with is going to be able to get through the mess you've made. But so too with ASP, because of the marketing muscle that Microsoft put behind its brainchild, you can expect to get plenty of ASP experience in the workforce, with a huge peer learning environment.

So far, this may sound religious to some, as project design and maintainability take on some very fuzzy and personal characteristics, with many varying perspectives, but it should be at the forefront of one's mind when beginning any software project. This leads me to the graphics designer you may end up working with, who doesn't know that the dynamic web site you are building really falls under software development ;) ...

Because ASP is scripting embedded in HTML, you can give the graphics designer a few easy function calls to embed, and s/he can take the rest from there, using her/his favorite GUI tools to craft the web site beautifully. Notice that you significantly increased the number of people that can work on your site by using an embedded scripting web application environment like ASP, versus going with a pure scripted CGI solution.

Another feature furthering maintainability is ASP's built-in support for Server Side Includes (SSI), which allows the developer to segment common parts of the site into modular include files. Thus is becomes easy to decompose a basic site template like:

    <html>
    <head><title>Company Name></title></head>
    <body>
    <!-- main body of page here -->
    Copyright / Disclaimer
    </body></html>

and separate a common header and footer that can be reused across every script:

    [header.inc]
    <html>
    <head><title>Company Name></title></head>
    <body>

    [footer.inc]
    Copyright / Disclaimer
    </body></html>

    [sample.asp]
    <!--#include file=header.inc-->
    <!-- main body of page here -->
    <!--#include file=footer.inc-->

### Powerful

When developing a web site under ASP, one has access to a complete set of objects and events, my favorite being $Session, which was one of ASP's key selling points for me. $Session is ASP's answer to the problem of HTTP being a stateless protocol. By using temporary session cookies, each web user has a unique $Session in which you may store data, and that follows them from script to script. Because the data storage for $Session is handled on the server, you do not have to worry about size limits of cookies as an alternate mechanism of storing user session data.

There are some very useful events as well. Let's say that you are using `$Session->{login}` to control a user account login and logout. Because $Session automatically times out every SessionTimeout, if a user walks away from her/his computer for SessionTimeout minutes, the `$Session->{login}` is destroyed along with the rest of the data stored in $Session, and the next person that uses the computer will find themselves automatically logged out from the account. This is a huge security win if you maintain a set of accounts at your web site that hold sensitive information like credit card numbers.

Here is a basic listing of the built-in objects available to the developer within every Apache::ASP script:

    	Object		-	Function
    	------			--------
    	$Session	-	session state
    	$Response	-	output
    	$Request	-	input
    	$Application	-	application state
    	$Server		-	OLE support + misc.

You might be looking at the $Application object as saying "huh, what's that?". Simply, $Application allows you to share data between various ASP scripts and users. Metaphorically it represents your web site as an application, and $Application is initialized when the first user $Session is created, and destroyed when the last user $Session is destroyed.

Events are triggered when these objects are created and destroyed. In addition to data initialization and destruction, these events allow the developer to define, in the global.asa, subroutines to be executed at these event times, providing hooks enabling the web site to function easily as a dynamic software application. The events are as follows:

    	Action			Event
    	------			------
            Script_OnStart *	Beginning of Script execution
            Script_OnEnd *		End of Script execution
    	Application_OnStart	Beginning of Application
    	Application_OnEnd	End of Application
    	Session_OnStart		Beginning of user Session.
    	Session_OnEnd		End of user Session.

      * These are API extensions that are not portable, but were
        added because they are incredibly useful

### Fast

Execution speed is always important when picking your web application environment ... shoot for the stars and design with the fastest from the beginning, saving yourself a massive redesign later when your site becomes a success. One of the motivations for not using PerlScript under IIS, a couple years ago, was that it was painfully slow, but has since been much improved. The mod_perl project boasts a 20 times speedup in CGIs handled by Apache::Registry, and it handles perl ASP scripts just as well under Apache::ASP, with some performance lost because of all the objects initialization and events execution that ASP handles.

The startup overhead on simple scripts is significantly more when moving from CGI to ASP under mod_perl for Apache, at least 20%, as shown in my previous Hello World - Web Application Benchmarks article, but this startup overhead will become relatively less important as your scripts get longer, and a base rate of 75 Apache::ASP requests per second on a PII 300 Solaris x86 is nothing to scoff at!

In order to justify using ASP over CGI despite the performance hit, just remember how much more maintainable and powerful ASP is. The general consensus is that developer time is much more valuable than computer time so save the former where possible!

### Next Month

In this article I tried to convey a sense of how and why you might use Apache::ASP to build your web site. Next month we will build a simple web site using some of the powerful and modular features ASP has to offer.