Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 09/19/07

ASP tools from AlphaSierraPapa

By Mark Gibbs

Today I have a number of very useful tools for building Web applications. These tools from Cristophe Wille AKA AlphaSierraPapa are all focused on Microsoft’s Application Server Pages (ASP) technology. Wille is also the author of "Teach Yourself ASP 2.0 in 24 Hours", a very good introduction to ASP.

Wille offers three commercial products: AspTear, which allows you to create an ASP-driven Web page capture; PortalPageFilter, which makes dynamic Web sites appear to be static; and the source code to most of his freeware products.

AspTear (a single site license is 35 Euros) retrieves the contents of a URL as a string (that is all that the free version does) as well as providing immediate saving to disk, SSL support, proxy server support, page caching, redirection support, and cookie handling.

While AspTear might be useful to a small group, PortalPageFilter (125 Euros for a single site license) is a tool that many sites will find useful. The problem it solves is that many search engines ignore dynamic content (specifically any URL that is a GET request, that is, has a “?” in it). The consequence of this is that highly ASP-driven dynamic sites may only get a fraction of their content indexed which, for commercial sites, is a big problem.

PortalPageFilter transforms a URL such as: http://www.mywebstore.com/product.asp?pid=20001

Into: http://www.mywebstore.com/PPF/pid/20001/product.asp

As you can see, the ASP page and its arguments are reformatted so that the called page appears to be static. The cost is using the PortalPageFilter code in the calling page to generate the URLs; for example:

<%strUrl = GenerateThis_OneParam("pid", "20001")%>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="<%=strURL%>">Product check.</a></p>

(Should be easy enough to create a preprocessor to generate the code.)

You might wonder why URLs in the calling page aren’t automatically re-written – Wille has a document explaining the issues.

PortalPageFilter can also be used with PHP-based sites.

Wille’s free tools are also worth checking out and the source code package is a pretty good deal for developers.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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