vb.net asp converting

[marfi95]

Hello all,

I have an application that has been running great in production for
well over a year now. It is a Windows form app, has FTP connectivity,
Oracle DB connectivity, fairly complex form usage and logic, using
listviews, splitters, etc....

Now, I've been approached with being asked what the effort would be to
put roughly the same app up, but web based in ASP. Not knowing a great
deal about ASP, I know there is not a "magic" tool that will convert
all my code, but is there anything to convert over the form pieces ?
Or what pieces can be converted ?

What are some recommendations as to even get started with this ? What
are some of the issues when dealing with ASP rather than a windows form
app on the desktop ?

Any help with a direction would be so beneficial.

Thanks.
Mark

 

[Marina]

The differences between web and windows are just so great and so
fundamental, that there will definitely be a lot of work involed - if things
are structured right, mostly in the UI. If all your business and data access
logic is completely separate from the user interface, then most of the work
will be recreating the user interface, and probably a good deal of work to
support the stateless nature of HTTP. The whole concept that on every
request you get a brand new instance of a page object, means you have a
different way of looking at your application.

Additionally, by default the server side controls that come with asp.net
don't provide for a great user experience and cause a lot of postbacks to
the server. If you want a more pleasant user experience, then you will need
to write quite a bit of javascript to accomplish that.

My guess is, to provide a functionally equivalent application (which may not
be possible within any sort of reasonable timeframe), this will be a lot
like writing the original application from scratch. The closer it needs to
be the equivalent client side functionality to the windows app, the more
work it will be.

 

[marfi95]

Thanks. Is ASP not the way to go ? Would JSP or something else be
any better ?