Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Brent's Screenshot-Scripting Windows

Author:Brent Simmons
Posted:12/21/1998; 12:15:24 PM
Topic:Brent's Screenshot-Scripting Windows
Msg #:1588 (In response to 1584)
Prev/Next:1587 / 1589

About emulating ASP in Frontier:

ASP does not use the Active Script Control: IIS is a full-blown Active Scripting host, with its own optimizations for performance. Frontier uses the Active Script Control in part because it's much easier than what IIS does.

Also: IIS sets up a context for the current page, so that your embedded scripts can affect the page without going through lots of hoops.

How Frontier might emulate ASP:

Just because we use the Script Control isn't a problem. Performance is not the same as you'd get from IIS. But I can confirm that performance on the dual-CPU Honker is quite excellent, anyway.

Setting up the context might be a little more difficult -- we'd want embedded scripts to have access to adrPageTable^.bodyText, which they'd just see as the "document" object. Some creative scripting in user.com and some small changes to our ScriptControlDLL should allow us to expose bodyText as the document object. We'd have to expose several methods along with that, most notably document.write.

The last matter is Frontier would have to parse out <% ... %> tags and run the scripts inside them. This could initially be done with scripts, and could be a new kernel verb later. (Since the macro processor should run before ASP parsing happens, this should be a new verb.)

The trick here is that Frontier would have to be aware that the ASP-like scripts might change anything in the bodyText, not just replace the tags they're embedded in, so the parser would start over from the first character until there are no more embedded scripts.

It appears to be do-able. The downside is that Frontier will probably not perform as fast as IIS at ASP processing, but performance should still be quite good, depending on machine. The upside is that you get ASP inside Frontier's CMS -- and there are loads of good things here. Even though ASP delivers powerful scripting features, one still doesn't have a good way to manage all those files on disk.

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