I got an email from WebAssist yesterday saying:
To better serve your needs and expand the depth of our offerings, WebAssist will be focusing efforts on the PHP platform exclusively and will cease to support classic ASP and ColdFusion.This is especially surprising, as WebAssist started as an ASP company, and only added PHP and ColdFusion support on later. But now, it seems that, at least in their opinion, PHP has beaten ASP. (ColdFusion has been something of a non-starter for years now...) In the articles I have seen the most telling reason people have switched to PHP is the price - PHP is free and open source, ASP is not. Do you use ASP on your Web pages any more? Or have you switched to a different server-side scripting language?
It’s a shame that ColdFusion is not used more. I’ve been using it for over 10 years and makes dynamic pages a breeze. Our sites are hybrids now, with mostly PHP, but when I need someting fast (which is most of the time) I do it with ColdFusion.
Hello Jennifer,
I would like to re-learn or learn more about ASP, ASP.NET, etc.
Norm McNamara
I use ColdFusion all the time. It’s easy and I’ve been able to meet all my Web development needs with it; not a single challenge required the use of another language.
Do you mean ASP or ASP.NET ? There is a world of difference. ASP died years ago, when ASP.NET arrived.
Both platforms have their merits, but no-one could describe ASP.NET as dead.
I don’t use much PHP or ASP, but PHP seems to be definitely the way to go. I am not working on an MS box, so ASP is actually a difficult path. PHP, on the other hand, just works.
Not free and open source? The mind boggles at the idea of a scripting language you have to pay to use. I’m not surprised it died. What surprises me is that it ever lived in the first place.
Classic ASP is pretty much retired at this point, but it is foolish to say that ASP is extinct. There are many formidable distinctions between classic ASP and ASP.net.
I have quite a few WebAssist products & I use ASP. At 1st I was upset when WA sent out this news, but then again all their products support both ASP & PHP so there’s no need to rebuy everything. The same holds true for Adobe’s Dreamweaver Developers Toolbox (Interakt). I’ve been told that if you know ASP you can pick up PHP fairly quickly. So all I’m looking at is the time to learn something I’ve been putting off.
Is classic ASP dying? Maybe; but you can find it all over the web in working sites & tutorials. I have one large international client that uses asp on several sites everyday. They seem happy.
What would it take for ASP to go bye bye?
DMX Zone, Nitobi, Linecraft, DW Zone & several others I can’t recall now to stop making ASP products. Finally Adobe dropping ASP from Dreamweaver.
A good question would be why DW CS4 has deprecated ASP.NET and JSP server behaviors and recordsets, but not ASP. I think it’s because asp is in such wide use.
As for myself, I learned MySQL in addition to SQL Server so I could offer cheaper hosting rates to my customers. The transition was very quick, I will do the same with PHP. However I am not dropping ASP or SQL Server at the moment.
Flash, JavaScript, whatever. The more skills we have, the more work we’ll receive.
Regards.
-j.c.
It’s a dream of mine yet to be realized