This white paper provides information about considerations that developers and system administrators should keep in mind when deploying a solution with Chili!Soft ASP.
In this white paper:
· Software Engineering Practices
Environment Considerations
Database Considerations
Web Server Considerations
General Considerations
· Programming Tips and Suggestions
General Tips
Scripting Tips
Database Access Tips
Chili!Soft ASP Limitations
· Company and Product Overview
About ASP
About Chili!Soft ASP
About Chili!Soft
· Chili!Soft ASP must be installed correctly to run reliably (in other words, you must use our installer).
· Test ASP applications on the same platform (same hardware, operating system and software payload) where they will be deployed before publishing to production systems.
· Load test ASP components before publishing to production systems.
· Test in-process components carefully (such as ODBC drivers and COM objects); they will take the ASP engine down if they crash.
· Make sure your database is properly configured before testing ASP applications.
· Make sure you have adequate expertise to properly configure ODBC; in some circumstances this can be very complicated.
· Design and test your ASP application on the same database where it will be deployed.
· Limiting yourself to "plain-vanilla" ADO functionality will make your code work with more databases.
· Watch out for implementation-dependent ADO behavior.
· Watch out for implementation-dependent ODBC driver behavior.
· Make sure you understand what SQL statements are supported by each database you plan to use; big differences exist among commercial databases.
· Be aware that support for stored procedures varies greatly between commercial databases.
· Be aware of different data types that are supported or not supported on different databases.
· ODBC drivers are seldom perfect, and when they do fail the chain reaction can take down the ASP engine.
· Connection pooling implemented in the Chili!Soft ASP ADO library can interact adversely with your database. Make sure you have thoroughly tested your application with connection pooling enabled prior to deploying.
· Be aware that Netscape and Microsoft browsers behave differently, especially in error handling. Be sure to test your application with multiple versions of each browser.
· Apache Web server is generally more reliable and easier to use than Netscape Web server.
· The Apache Web server, as distributed by Apache, does not compile on HP-UX without significant modification.
· Make sure .asp files are readable to the Web server and that the parent directory is readable and executable.
· Make sure that your system complies with all requirements, including OS version, Java version, Web server version, database version.
· Going through a proxy server can, under some circumstances, prevent ASP syntax error messages from being displayed at the browser.
· Make sure you have the latest version of Chili!Soft ASP and the Chili!Soft ADO library.
· Make sure your system has enough memory and disk space. Chili!Soft ASP performs substantially faster if given sufficient RAM.
· File system locking must be enabled if your home directory is on an NFS disk.
· Watch out for ^M (DOS line breaks) in text files on UNIX. These can be inadvertently introduced by using NT text editors.
· Know when and how to use the chcleanup script.
· Learn to read ASP engine logs and Web server logs.
· After changing the casp.cnfg file, you must re-start both the ASP engines and Web server.
· You must stop the ASP engines before registering controls.
· Be careful not to damage the LICENSE.LIC file (e.g., by editing it on Windows NT).
· Use a clean UNIX shell to start up the ASP engines.
· Inherit user only works in multi-process mode on Solaris.
· Beware of MFC dependencies in your custom components.
· Don’t forget that the ASP engine, running as root, can change files regardless of the permissions set on the file.
· Be aware of case sensitivity on UNIX.
· Watch out for ‘/’ and ‘\’ in file names.
· Don’t use ‘On Error Resume Next’ – it masks errors and can lead to system failures.
· Don’t use VBScript or JScript functions past version 3.2.
· VBScript and JScript errors can cause a memory leak; if the error is repeated, the leak can be substantial.
· In existing AIX, HP-UX and Windows releases, you cannot store arrays in the dictionary object.
· With Chili!Beans, don’t use arrays of objects unless they are all of the same type.
· Don’t store objects in Application or Session variables (for performance reasons).
· Avoid using application.lock (for performance reasons).
· Don’t put "LANGUAGE=" directives in include files
· Changes in include files are not automatically reflected in the *asp files that include them. You need to ‘touch’ the .asp file to get the ASP engine to grab a new copy of the include file instead of using the cached copy.
· Don’t use client side cursors in the currently released versions of Chili!Soft ADO.
· Don’t use Recordset.AddNew or Recordset.Update unless you are sure they are implemented in your database and ODBC driver.
· Use GetRows with large recordsets, not MoveNext.
· Don’t use Recordset.RecordCount if you can avoid it (for performance reasons).
· You cannot use ASP components written in Visual Basic.
· You cannot use third-party COM objects in Linux.
· Microsoft Access (.mdb) files are not supported on UNIX or Linux.
· Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) functionality is not available.
ASP is an open, compile-free Web application environment that combines scripting, HTML custom server components, and robust database publishing to create dynamic Web-based business applications. With ASP, developers can build browser-independent Web solutions and publish legacy databases to the Web using any of the several industry-leading development tools. ASP is widely known for accommodating developers of varying skill sets and expertise, and for allowing corporate IT managers to more effectively allocate scarce developer resources. There are more than 1,000,000 ASP developers, over 500 companies producing ASP components and applications, and approximately 25,000 public Web sites using ASP.
Chili!Soft ASP is the functional equivalent of Microsoft’s ASP. Microsoft ASP is available exclusively on Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server on Windows NT. Chili!Soft ASP enables ASP on other leading Web servers and operating systems, making it the first open, cross-platform Web application server based on Active Server Pages (ASP) architecture. Chili!Soft ASP is supported by industry leading Web development tools such as Microsoft Visual InterDev and FrontPage 2000, Macromedia™ UltraDev™, NetObjects ScriptBuilder™, Adobe GoLive and Sybase PowerSite™, and provides ASP functionality to Netscape, Lotus, IBM, Apache and other Web servers.
Chili!Soft, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), is a provider of enabling technologies and applications for Active Server Pages. Chili!Soft's award-winning flagship product, Chili!Soft ASP, extends the ASP framework to major Web servers and operating systems including Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Hewlett Packard HP-UX, and Linux. Chili!Soft was incorporated in 1997 with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. For more information, please visit the Chili!Soft Web site at http://www.chilisoft.com or call (425) 957-1122.
Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Legal Notice.