[Mono-list] Re: ASP

[Robert Deviasse]

Please try to keep the interfaces compatible with XSP, which is going to be 
in Apache 2. XSP is becoming a W3 standard, and it seems to have every 
capability that ASP.NET does, including multilingual support.

ASP.NET looks simple on the surface. It doesn't look like you need to do 
much more than GSP did (http://gsp.sourceforge.net) to support multiple 
languages. However, when you start looking at all the caching and other 
options on the many of the directives (e.g. page), things look more 
complicated. Basing Mono's ASP.NET support on Microsoft's ASP.NET libraries 
for IIS compatibility, and Mono's ASP.NET support on XSP for Apache 
compatibility really simplifies things.

The catch, right now, is that the reference implementation is in Java and 
multilingual support is done through IBM's Bean Scripting Framework 
(http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/projects/bsf). I can't find anything 
in the XSP spec that says it has to be based on Java.

That's not really a big issue since any one of the following approaches 
should work:

(1) XSP can be rewritten for Mono using the Java implement as a guide. 
Translating Java to C# doesn't seem like an overwhelmingly complicated job 
since both languages are so similar. The tough part is coming up with the 
initial architecture. Microsoft and Apache have already done this for their 
web servers through ASP.NET and Cocoon (for XSP).

(2) There seems to be some interest in getting Java to compile to .NET, so 
if this open source effort succeeds (or even takes off the ground), Cocoon 
could be compiled for Mono and we'd get XSP for free.

(3) It really isn't necessary to completely integrate with XSP, all that's 
needed to be done is to generate XSP pages. This article gives a brief 
account of what needs to be done.
    http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/bealers20000616.php3?page=1
Now I don't like the implementation very much. XML doesn't have to be 
generated manually, there are classes to do it. Instead of writing to a file 
xinclude should be able to read the stream directly. However, the gist of 
the idea should be applicable to Mono too.



For more information on XSP, see:
   http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/
   http://www.suranyami.com/XSPtutorial/


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