InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 11, 1999
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ChiliSoft's ASP and Halcyon's iASP are both highly compatible clones of Microsoft's Active Server Pages, but neither is clearly a better choice than the other. They're architecturally different and will appeal to different developer audiences.
By Jason Levitt
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pplication servers drive the user experience at nearly every dot-com company, and Active Server Pages, Microsoft's application server technology for Windows NT 4.0 (see sidebar "Microsoft's Active Server Pages: A Primer"), is one of the most popular for small and midsize Web sites. But Active Server Pages can present some challenges for businesses because it runs only under Windows NT and Microsoft's Internet Information Server. Fortunately for less-parochial sites, Active Server Pages is also an aggressively imitated application server.ChiliSoft Inc.'s ASP 3.0 and Halcyon Software Inc.'s Instant ASP (iASP) 1.01 are two Active Server Pages clones that run under operating systems besides NT 4.0 and with Web servers other than Internet Information Server. Both offer a high degree of compatibility with Active Server Pages. This lets customers develop apps for Active Server Pages using Microsoft and third-party tools, yet run them on other operating systems and Web servers--in some cases taking advantage of technologies, such as Enterprise JavaBeans and Corba, that aren't directly supported by Microsoft.
While both the ChiliSoft and Halcyon products offer capabilities similar to Active Server Pages, neither is clearly a better choice than the other. They are architecturally quite different products and will appeal to different developer audiences.
Halcyon's iASP is a Java servlet written from scratch using the Java programming language. As a result, Halcyon has been able to rapidly move iASP to the many platforms that support Java. Released only five months ago, iASP is a young product and still doesn't support as much of the functionality of Active Server Pages as ChiliSoft's product.
ChiliSoft ASP, written using C++, uses Web-server API technology, and ChiliSoft licenses its VBScript and JScript scripting engines directly from Microsoft. ChiliSoft ASP is less portable than Halcyon's iASP, and ChiliSoft has been slow to move it to other operating systems and Web servers. But ChiliSoft ASP has been shipping for more than a year and offers a more complete Active Server Pages implementation than Halcyon's iASP.
Halcyon's pure Java implementation is much less expensive than ChiliSoft's and offers a full suite of Java developer APIs. It's the clear choice if Java is your development language and you want as many platform choices as possible. It also supports Sun's Java Server Pages (www.java.sun.com/jsp) and can run alongside third-party application servers, such as Oracle's Application Server, that have significant Java servlet support. ChiliSoft's more mature implementation offers more complete compatibility with Microsoft's Active Server Pages but at a higher cost and on fewer platforms.
The Halcyon and ChiliSoft ASP products depend on several pieces of software to work smoothly. Both Halcyon's iASP and ChiliSoft ASP require a Web server; Halcyon also requires a Java run-time environment. Because of the complex interdependency between these pieces of software and the underlying operating system, qualifying and certifying their products on particular combinations of operating systems and Web servers is a mandatory step for both Halcyon and ChiliSoft products. Both have certified their products on a number of combinations of operating systems and Web servers, but there are many they haven't certified yet.
For this review, it was difficult to find a non-Windows operating system and Web-server combination that both products were certified to run under. ChiliSoft, because its ASP is written in less-portable C++ and uses Web server APIs, has been slow to move to new operating systems and certify new versions of Web servers.
I tested the products under the commonly used combination of Solaris 6 and the Apache Web server (version 1.33 for ChiliSoft and version 1.36 for Halcyon) running on a SparcStation 20. Also, I chose Sun's Java 2 run-time environment version 1.2.1 for use with Halcyon.
One thing that may not be clear about these products is that the vendors intend customers to develop their applications under Windows NT using the usual Microsoft tools such as Script Debugger. Once debugged and running under NT, the application could then be deployed on another operating system such as Solaris running ChiliSoft ASP or iASP. Besides making sure that your application is 100% compatible with Microsoft's Active Server Pages, another reason to develop under NT is that debugging tools aren't available under other operating systems.
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