Is ASP.NET the future of web applications

[Elias Politakis]

What I am failing to understand is how come and the whole world is treating
ASP.NET as the irresistable pie for web development, whereas you have a
server roundtrip for each mouse click on a form.

Sure Internet is not as slow as it used to be, especially with ISDN and ADSL
connections, but still it is not as fast as it should be in order to support
that technology...

Sometimes I wonder, what is wrong of having HTML bound ADO recordsets on the
client and using XML HTTP for fetching and updating data to and from an ASP
page. Why this model is not far better than ASP.NET ?

Consider, with the model described above, you download a data form (HTML)
once and then you have a roundtrip to the server each time you want to fetch
data from refined criteria or update them.. minimal roundtrips with binary
data travelling over the cable... no reduntand HTML or XML transfers.

My thesis is that HTML alone is good enough for the presentation layer of
data and ASP and XML could be used as the medium for data transfers - not
mixed content and data, promoted by both ASP and ASP.NET models.

Since it is possible to achieve separation of data from the content (data
inside ADO Recordsets bound to HTML tables) and a smooth and managable way
of data transfers through XML HTTP, why ASP.NET ?

Why since Microsoft gives us all the required tools and technology for
competitive (perfornace wise) web applications, promotes those two models
(ASP, ASP.NET) in their worst possible usage ?

And yet, the natives follow this trend..

Well some natives are getting restless.


EGP.

 

[Alvin Bruney]

You would rather return to ASP? I don't think you would, it's clearly not
the way forward. You just want to avoid the annoying postback flicker? How
about using a webservice in the back end to get data and return without a
'post back'.As you become more and more knowledgeable about the technology,
you will see that there are ways to reduce or even avoid the annoying
flicker. Even an asp website which takes 5 seconds to get data without
screen flicker IS annoying to the user.

I think developers make screen flicker out to be a bigger problem than it
really is. Flicker is a problem if it takes a relatively long period of time
for the screen to update. Otherwise it is not. Developers ought to
concentrate on building chatty interfaces which grab small packets of data
rather than huge dumps of data which cause postbacks to last 10 seconds.
Turning off viewstate when it isn't needed and using lighter html controls
instead of webserver controls when the need arises. I always blame
developers for poor user experiences because they build the apps in the
first place. What's to stop a developer from saying PERFORMANCE IS A FEATURE
requested by the client. So work on that performance and get clever about
how you obtain and present that information. The extra effort promotes a
positive user experience.

 

[tom]

What I am failing to understand is how come and the whole world is treating
ASP.NET as the irresistable pie for web development, whereas you have a
server roundtrip for each mouse click on a form.

ASP.NET was intended to be an abstraction layer that hides the
Internet from the Visual Basic programmer. It is a new implementation
of the ideas and constructs in the "Scripting Object Model" (SOM) that
was in Visual InterDev. (Yes, VI had server-side or client-side
controls, a datagrid-like object, and various other web objects).

The intention was that ASP.NET would present Internet programming as
if it were just like VB6 programming: even-driven with Windows
objects. If successful, VB6 developers could write Internet
applications and not notice that they were on the Internet.
Unfortunately this is not possible for a number of reasons that we
have no time for now, but a lack of knowledge of computing history
ensured that Microsoft would overlook these reasons.

Somewhere in the project other changes occurred: the languages (VB and
C++) were changed, the framework became purely object-oriented, the
underlying structures had to be changed and, in the end, almost
everything was changed. The project lost direction and focus, and .NET
is the result: a kind of Aliens III baby.

Sure Internet is not as slow as it used to be, especially with ISDN and ADSL
connections, but still it is not as fast as it should be in order to support
that technology...

Sometimes I wonder, what is wrong of having HTML bound ADO recordsets on the
client and using XML HTTP for fetching and updating data to and from an ASP
page. Why this model is not far better than ASP.NET ?

The XML is unnecessary: it requires two additional parsing/translation
steps. But otherwise you are correct: ADO recordsets, ASP, a language
(VBScript or JScript) and HTML are adequate.

Consider, with the model described above, you download a data form (HTML)
once and then you have a roundtrip to the server each time you want to fetch
data from refined criteria or update them.. minimal roundtrips with binary
data travelling over the cable... no reduntand HTML or XML transfers.

My thesis is that HTML alone is good enough for the presentation layer of
data and ASP and XML could be used as the medium for data transfers - not
mixed content and data, promoted by both ASP and ASP.NET models.

Since it is possible to achieve separation of data from the content (data
inside ADO Recordsets bound to HTML tables) and a smooth and managable way
of data transfers through XML HTTP, why ASP.NET ?

I agree, but would omit XML, as described above.

Why since Microsoft gives us all the required tools and technology for
competitive (perfornace wise) web applications, promotes those two models
(ASP, ASP.NET) in their worst possible usage ?

Because VB developers were not moving to the Internet. Microsoft
believed ASP.NET would entice them but that did not happen. Moving
from VB6 to VB.NET and ASP.NET is a much bigger jump than going from
VB6 to ASP+VBScript and is also a much bigger jump than going from VB6
to Java+Apache+Linux+PostGreSQL or (Perl or PHP)+Apache+Linux+MySQL.

And yet, the natives follow this trend..
Well some natives are getting restless.

Many, if not most, are leaving Microsoft tools and platforms. IIS is
buggy and the tools are limited.
tom