Hot Product from Chili
By Ken Cox
Back in the summer of '96 a Microsoft product with the code name "Denali" turned my head. At the time, I was trying to learn CGI scripting with Perl and not getting anywhere. I could handle myself quite well in Visual Basic and was looking for a way to leverage those skills in Web development. Fortunately, my participation in a Microsoft newsgroup landed me on the first beta for Denali—what would become Active Server Pages (ASP). In 1996, I knew that Denali was a winner on Internet Information Server. However, I never dreamed that ASP would run on both Netscape and Apache Web servers—and on non-Microsoft platforms to boot!
ChiliSoft, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington, foresaw the ASP phenomenon and brought it to Linux, IBM AIX, Solaris, and Hewlett Packard UNIX operating systems. The product—the subject of this review—is ChiliSoft ASP. ChiliSoft's port made sense. Just as developers like me prefer to code in Visual Basic (actually, VBScript), Webmasters want to build on their existing servers and platforms. The second review in this section focuses on a similar product available from HalcyonSoft that uses Java to bring ASP to multiple platforms.
Basic Ingredients
This review is based on the following software and hardware running on my intranet:
