asp-ajaxed+ Step 1 Goal

[Bunkerbuster]

Hi all,

I see that there are a few people here hew like to participate in the
process :), all the help is welcome. It will not be the most used
framework in the world but it will enhance your programming skills and
you can change ideas :).

But before we can start, I need your input for the goals of this
project.

Main Goal: Build a business framework for web based classic asp
applications and using the best tools for the job!

I think that needs some explanation.
Because the application is build in asp (vb-script) and uses AJAX
(XMLHttpRequest) you will always need a IIS (web server) server to use
it. So the framework will create (x)HTML pages.

The best tool for the job.
If you are building applications, you have to use a lot of different
program languages (tools) to build a application (asp, css en js). And
the main goal is to build valid (x)HTML pages or any other documents
in different markup language’s (pdf, xls, doc etc). But there are a
lot of ways to create these pages/documents, and we have to find the
correct way, but the for now the focus will be to create a XHTML valid
webpage.

In the beginning it was best practice to use FrontPage to generate
html pages (yes I am a shame that I used FrontPage in 1999 to cover up
my lack of programming skills). But quickly my colleagues and I
started with asp (back in the days it wasn’t classic ASP, just plain
ASP).

And the best practice then (and still is in a lot of (very big)
company’s) is to combine all the tools of the trade in one page. In a
lot of cases you will see that, when you open a webpage. The page
is combined data(hardcoded or DB), style (portal, page and element
level), scripting(asp, js (in the page and in includes) and formatted
(html). This is un-maintainable, and soon you will have a legacy web
environment that you need for your day to day business and takes ages
to change something.

In the past my colleagues and I had to maintain a web application with
more than 120.000 asp pages that generated more then 300.000 unique
Uri’s. After a clean-up we ended up with 60.000 (only 20.000 asp pages
left and 40.000 xml documents) that generated the same amount of
Uri’s. The main idea was to extract everything from the page and use
the best tools for the job.

What we did was: transform all the asp functions in to classes,
JavaScript in master.js files, clean-up the data and then transform
them to .xml files (40.000) (and ready to export to a DB), all the
style elements in one .css file and generate clean valid XHTML with
XSL.

I think that a lot of people hew are still using classic ASP (or any
other program languages) will have the same problem whit this legacy.
And then you are stuck to classic ASP (or that languages), but if you
can clean-up all those pages, you are not bound to a specific program
language. And a good and easy to understand framework in the same
language makes that job a lot easier.

In the next post I will go deeper in to the preparation (development)
and I will suggest some enhancements, all the feedback and suggestions
are welcome.

Happy programming with asp-ajaxed+

Bunkerbuster