Its been quite a while since I last posted here(almost a month) and that post was after more than a month as March didn’t see any posts, or to cut a long story short, only 10 posts so far in this year as the fourth month wanes!! Been quite busy so far & whatever little time I got for blogging was consumed by other blogs, its been a struggle managing time. Now if that wasn’t enough, an old contact asked me to write some code in ASP for him to get him out of a spot of bother. I tried unsuccessfully to reason with him that I don’t have time for doing that & that its been about 2 years since I stopped coding in ASP and I’m quite rusty. 😐
How does it feel like writing something that one has given up(for good I think) and which one loved very much? ASP was the first thing that I learned to breathe life in web-applications(never really counted Perl) & liked it from the beginning(perhaps due to familiarity with Visual Basic 6, though I seriously started into it later). But after getting over the stuff that ASP had to offer out of box, it became quite irritating at times when I required it to do something which it didn’t support out of box and demanded a use of a 3rd party COM. Now had I had the privilege of doing it all on a server under my control, it would really have been fun, with me creating anything that I wanted in Visual Basic 6(or in VC++) to be consumed by ASP, but that was not to be since almost whatever I wrote took refuge on a shared server and webhosts were(are) known to be cold hearted as far as allowing custom COM was concerned. And they didn’t give much of a consideration to providing many 3rd party COM to do various tasks since ASP lacked in many & there’s only a limit to what the webhost can provide for in shared hosting. 😈
This was one of the reasons that had me start in the server side implementation of Java, known as JSP. Backed by the legendary Java, it was a no nonsense thing which wasn’t corrupted by the dependence on COM, but the shortcoming was that it wasn’t that much feasible to code client solutions in JSP as hosting was scarce & heavy on pocket. Again, my roving eyes settled on PHP, with its huge following and known efficiency, combined with its independence of any COM or steep hosting costs and a rich library of functions along with free availability of many libraries that did almost anything that a user wants. Within a week I had my first full blown CMS ready in PHP, it was so cool!! I wasn’t missing ASP a lot which was a surprise since I missed it a lot when coding JSP.
After divorcing ASP, I set out to follow PHP. But little did I know that I’ll be dragged back to show my love for ASP yet again. All I can say in my defense that even after 2 years of not having programmed in ASP, it all came back effortlessly, looked like as if I’d never stopped coding in it. 😀
What it was? Maybe for the next time!! 😉