[thelist] Looking to move from ISAPI to something else

Roger Ly evolt at matchpenalty.com
Thu Apr 28 19:59:25 CDT 2005


Hey all,

I'm doing some research into possible alternatives for
technology used to build our company web site. 
Currently, we are working on IIS with Oracle.  We have
built our site with ISAPI extensions written in C++
running on top of IIS.  We have developed a proprietary
scripting language on top of that to help us partially
separate some of our business logic from the
presentation layer displayed to the end user.  While
this has been a decent solution thus far, we are
investigating the possible move to another solution
that has a more powerful scripting front-end, while
still being able to use and support any legacy business
logic we have already developed.

Some of the things that are required by us:
* We will still remain on the IIS platform
* We still need to interface easily with Oracle
* We want to retain some legacy code we have written in
C++ and exported into DLLs (access via COM or something
similar would be ideal).  There is no need for us to
re-write our billing libraries, for example.
* We would love to keep a good deal of
presentation/business logic separation.  Being able to
hire HTML developers who don't necessarily understand
how our legacy code works, but can still design and
build functional pages would be a plus.
* Being able to easily debug and profile things as we
run into a problems is a must-have.

I have currently been doing some in-depth investigation
into the different areas I have some experience in: 
JSP/J2EE, ASP.NET, PHP and ColdFusion.  For most of the
points above, I think using these technologies as a
front-end scripting-type language would suffice.  For
all of these, the presentation/business logic
separation is a matter of education on the development
teams part, they all can be used to separate the two,
but of course, they all can be used incorrectly in the
opposite way.

The two biggest desires are access to legacy C++ code
via COM (or something similar), and tied with that, the
ability to easily debug and step through problems with
the code, both on the scripting side, and as it makes
its way into the legacy libraries.  Since our current
scripting library is written in the ISAPI extension
layer, debugging just requires us to attach to the
current ISAPI process, and walk through the code.  As
we separate things out into two different technologies,
it will become more difficult to attach to the JSP
engine, for example, and then when it attempts to make
a call to an outside library, attach to that library as
well so we can see how everything is working.

Does anyone here have any practical experience on the
matters that I have brought up?  Can you point me to a
good set of resources to help continue my research?

Moving off of Windows is currently not an option in
this case.  And this isn't a "which technology is
better" question -- that will ultimately lead to some
amount of a flame war, I'm afraid.

Thanks all,

Roger


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