Curious - Is ASP really an E-Commerce solution?

[rubyknight]

I have created a few small to medium ASP/SQL applications and they're working well.I'm curious though, beside ASP, SQL, WEB server with SSL, should there other components to be included to satisty a generic standard in today's modern e-commerce system (considering automated and manual intruders)?Another curiosity is the implementation of ASP/SQL application for dial-up users, which is considerably slower than Broadband or faster users--is ASP/SQL a good e-commerce (or similar) solution?Hope for some advices from e-commerce/portal veterans. :)Thanks.

[Mr.Jay]

Hey rubyknight,I was hired to develop a e-commerce site for http://dibor.co.uk last year.Although i had a few glitches at first as it was my first big e-commerce job, ASP actually handled everything better than i expected.I used stored procedures to block out attempts to run sql injections and to help speed up big querys.As far as the speed on a 56k modem i couldnt tell you, but what i can tell you is that the customers of dibor.co.uk are mainly mature older adults who live in rural areas where i would be surprised if many of them had broadband. To my knowledge there has been no complaints recieved about speed.So as for your question, is asp, sql sufficient for e-commerce ? my answer is Yes !

[justsomeguy]

It depends on the size of the site and what you have available to you. If you have SQL Server 2005 available, it will be a lot easier then if you had something older then that. If you can use ASP.NET, it will be a lot more powerful then using ASP classic. We have an application written in ASP classic designed for SQL Server 7/2000, and it really starts to chug when there are upwards of several hundred thousand records in the database. The database wasn't designed right to begin with, but the older versions of SQL Server are limiting me in how I can speed up the reports and things. I do know that when this application gets rewritten in PHP/MySQL, it will probably be an entire order of magnitude faster for most things, especially reporting. But, if it was designed correctly in the first place and didn't need to use some of the more powerful SQL things that the older versions of SQL server don't support, then it would be considerably quicker.

[rubyknight]

Thanks Jay and JustSomeGuy...Yes, all of the ASP-based servers I've been doing are running well 'till now, but after reading some sneak-peeks of ASP.NET I began to... thinking whether I need to migrate to ASP.NET in order to secure my job--whether it is a necessary skills to live as a web programmer etc.I've been using MSSQL 2000, which JustSomeGuy mentioned was not as efficient as the MSSQL 2005, but luckily I always limit the "select" with "top" clause. I remember inserting more than 80,000 simple records of 2 columns (both varchar(32)), and they took longer... exponentially maybe... *gasps!*... but won't do it again!Ok, the questions remain... Will migrating from MSSQL2000 to MSSQL2005 help the database speed greatly or was it meant for upgrades in other technical areas?How about ASP to ASP.NET? ... just when I started to feel at home in ASP forum.

[justsomeguy]

Upgrading the database probably adds some efficiency and optimization improvements, but it also adds some sorely missed features, like the LIMIT clause. It sort of amazes me that SQL Server 2005 is the first version to support LIMIT.ASP.NET should definately be faster, it is built on a completely different ideology. For one, ASP.NET applications get compiled, ASP classic applications are still interpreted. That means that the same code would run faster using ASP.NET then it would using ASP classic. They also made several other improvements as well I'm sure. I have an application right now written in ASP/VB that queries an active directory server for the list of users, populates a dictionary object with the user data, and displays the users on the page. For an AD server that contains around 1200 users, this page takes over 4 minutes to execute. That's a rate of processing 5 users every second, which means it takes .2 seconds to process each individual user. For reference, most of the PHP/MySQL applications I write have pages that finish in around .01 - .1 seconds total for the entire page. So clearly both ASP classic and VBScript have a lot of work to do with regard to optimization. The unfortunate thing is that Microsoft stopped development on those, so those optimizations will never happen.