ChiliSoft ASP is priced about twice as high as iASP, but it includes some features iASP leaves out. In particular, ChiliSoft includes the Merant database drivers. It also supports COM under Unix with Mainsoft's Win32 libraries. COM objects written in C++ to run under Windows NT can be recompiled under Unix with few changes. Java objects can be instantiated using ChiliSoft's Chilibeans framework. However, objects written in Visual Basic are not portable to ChiliSoft ASP.

ChiliSoft has implemented, and bundles, three of the 12 installable Microsoft components: Active Data Objects, Browser Capabilities, and Filesystem Objects. While these are arguably the three most useful and important components Microsoft includes with Active Server Pages, it would be better to see the other components as well.

It also makes porting of existing Active Server Pages applications more difficult without them. ChiliSoft says it will ship more components by year's end. While ChiliSoft appears to support nearly all of the built-in components of Active Server Pages, it supports only about 80% of Active Data Objects 1.5. New versions of Microsoft's installable components are shipped in MSN developer updates.

ChiliSoft ASP includes SQLlink from Merant, which gives it a wide range of ODBC connectibility with various database vendors.

ChiliSoft has been playing the Active Server Pages clone game a lot longer than Halcyon and plans to be in it for the long haul. According to ChiliSoft, it already has licenses in place for the 5.0 versions of VBScript and JScript, which it will be able to ship soon after Windows 2000 ships.

Porting Microsoft technologies to non-Windows platforms has become something of a cottage industry in the 1990s. Whether it's running Windows 95 under Mac OS or using Solaris as a Windows file server, customers want the convenience of using a non-Windows operating system while still reaping the benefits of Windows application compatibility and Microsoft software development tools.

Under a non-Windows operating system, however, customers typically sacrifice some degree of Windows compatibility in order to achieve their other objective, usually performance improvements or easier administration.

ChiliSoft and Halcyon are the only contenders I know of in the Active Server PagesÐcompatible market. An open-source Active Server Pages implementation from the Active Scripting Organization (www.activescripting.org) called OpenASP has been evolving, though it appears to have stalled.

Both Halcyon and ChiliSoft have to play in the shadow of Microsoft and figure out how to deploy new features as Microsoft makes them available under Active Server Pages. Neither cloner, for example, offers Microsoft's Transactional Active Server Pages yet--though it's unlikely they could be made to run on non-Windows platforms anyway.

In this competitive and growing market for application server technology, users should expect both companies to aggressively support more Web server and operating systems and improve performance and stability.

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