ASP, IIS application, ActiveX ... I'm so confused.

[Al Smith]

Hi,

I've written a few pure ASP procedures (VB script and notepad) that work well. I also have VB6 that I use to create programs for the company I work for. It gives me the options of creating an IIS application, DHTML applications, and ActiveX exe's, and dll's.
Should I be using one of these to create web-based applications? Which one?
Or should I just stick with ASP?

Thanks,
Al.




[Edited by Al Smith on 07-10-2000 at 09:33 PM]

[Ianpbaker]

Hi Al

It all depends on the size and usage of you web app.

If it is a small amount of script on each page that doesn't do a great deal, then using just script in your asp page is fine. But the problem is as soon as you start doing hefty stuff with a lot of hits your server's resources drop drastically. When it starts getting near that stage I would highly recomend writting a Activex dll to do all your heavy stuff and then reference it in your ASP.

Also if your getting a high hit count I would consider making the DLL into a MTS(Microsoft Transaction Server) Package, as It handles the threading a lot better than IIS does. This is quite easy to do, The msdn site shows you how

Hope this helps

Ian

[Al Smith]

Hi,
Thank you for the reply.
Another question though.
When I write a procedure using the IIS application in VB6, it creates a dll. Is this the ActiveX dll that you're refering to?
There is also a seperate selection to create an ActiveX dll.
Thanks,
Al.

[Ianpbaker]

Hi Al

I've seen the IIS application myself, but nether used it. What I've always done and seen is to create a normal activex DLL as yo would do if you were creating one for a normal VB app. you can then reference that in the ASP using the server.createobject("Mydllproject.myclass").

There are two things to watch out for when creating Dll's for the web. One is tht they are stateless and you cant hold variable's or any connection from one ASP page to another.

Second is that as you probalbly know, ASP only deals with Variant data types. So when you are ceating your procedures that take parameters from ASP you can do one of two things. Either Set each paramater to the various datatypes in the procedure, then convert the variable in ASP whilst passing them.

e.g


public sub Addtwovalues(A as Interger, B as integer, mytext as string)

then in the ASP you would have
MyObject.Addtwovalue Cint(myvar1),Cint(myvar2), Cstr(myvar3)


alternatly you can have eacj of the paramaters as variants and convert them inside the procedure.

Either way it works just fine.

Hope this helps

Ian