Benefits ASP.NET over CGI

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stijn Verrept
  • Start date Start date
S

Stijn Verrept

Hi,

I need to make a small web-application and was thinking about doing it
in ASP.NET. Another developer (which is also network engineer) says it
is hazardous to run .NET on his IIS server.
He asks me why not do it in CGI which will be much faster and offers
more flexibility.
I thought ASP.NET was faster but I'm not sure. Can somebody give me
concrete benefits of using ASP.NET over CGI (and vice versa).
The application will need to connect to a SQL server and have some
comboboxes and a grid.
 
CGI is an older technology. CGI was practically the first way to produce
dynamic content for websites. CGI applications have quite a few drawbacks
ISAPI/ASP.NET applications. Speed/Performance and scalability being the
primary issues with CGI that the ISAPI technology addresses. There are a
number of frameworks that are built on top of the ISAPI technology. In other
words the primary engine is an ISAPI. They are (to name a few)
1. ASP
2, ASP.NET
3. Cold Fusion
4. Java Server Pages (JSP)

They all use ISAPI engines (and not CGI).
 
If he thinks its hazardous to run ASP.NET then he doesnt know what he is
talking about.
 
Shiv said:
CGI is an older technology. CGI was practically the first way to
produce dynamic content for websites. CGI applications have quite a
few drawbacks ISAPI/ASP.NET applications. Speed/Performance and
scalability being the primary issues with CGI that the ISAPI
technology addresses. There are a number of frameworks that are built
on top of the ISAPI technology. In other words the primary engine is
an ISAPI. They are (to name a few) 1. ASP
2, ASP.NET
3. Cold Fusion
4. Java Server Pages (JSP)

They all use ISAPI engines (and not CGI).
Click to expand...

Thanks for your answer, so performance is 1 benefit, any other?
 
Thanks for your answer, so performance is 1 benefit, any other?
There are too many to enumerate. How would you answer the question "What is
the benefit of a windowed 32-bit Operating System over DOS?" It's about the
same kind of question.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.
 
Kevin said:
There are too many to enumerate. How would you answer the question
"What is the benefit of a windowed 32-bit Operating System over DOS?"
It's about the same kind of question.
Click to expand...

Ok I understand, but is there a paper on the net about this? There
must be a list of benefits why to use ASP.NET and not CGI, ASP, ...
 
You can read all about ASP.Net on the Microsoft web site. You might want to
start at http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/. I don't think you'll find much
of anything comparing ASP.Net to CGI, for the same reason that you won't
find anything comparing Windows Server 2003 to DOS. CGI is nearly obsolete.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.
 
I have an article on my website that talks about ISAPI or CGI/ASP. In my
tutorials section - Building ISAPI Applications using Delphi -
Articles -ISAPI versus CGI/ASP.

There was a great link to Microsoft's website (which is not valid anymore)
that clearly showed the performance difference between ISAPI, ASP and CGI

ISAPI/ASP.NET applications are typically multi-threaded and threads once
spawned are cached for re-use. With IIS most ISAPI frameworks (ASP.NET
included) can (and do) avail of thread pooling (using I/O completion ports)
which further improved performance and scalability.

On the one hand we are comparing the two frameworks. CGI versus ISAPI, and
yes, the primary benefits of ISAPI over CGI is performance and scalability.
On the other hand, built on top of this framework are tool sets such as
ASP.NET that are very extensive. CGI has no such framework. So productivity
is another advantage.

Plus due to the nature of CGI applications, they can't be debugged (set
break points, see values of variables etc.).
 
Shiv said:
I have an article on my website that talks about ISAPI or CGI/ASP. In
my tutorials section - Building ISAPI Applications using Delphi -
Articles -ISAPI versus CGI/ASP.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the info!!!
 
For one thing , CGI is much slower than some of the other legacy technologies
(e.g., ASP). and much, much, much slower than current technologies (JSP,
Webspheres, ASP.NET).

Also, CGI is not very flexible. You are very limited with what you can do.

Development time will take, many, many, many times longer using this old
technology. Developing a CGI is, put very simply,. very time consuming. ASP,
JSP and Websphere takes up a much shorter time and ASP.NET takes up even less
time than JSP, Websphere and ASP.

Finally, ASP.NET uses the .NET Framework which means the managed code
paradigm, which means that you are always using safe code (you can bypass this
and use unmanaged code, if you want, but you rarely have to with .NET web
apps). So your apps are safe -- much safer than with older technologies, such
as ASP and, much, much, much safer than with technologes from the dawn of the
internet (i.e., CGI). Using the Framework also means access to over 3,500
classes, many third-party add-ins as well as the .NET Framework's built-in
accessibility to many data access methods and platforms (Oracle, DB2, MySQL,
SQL Server, Access, XML, MS-Office, etc. etc.) thanks to ADO,.NET. Did I
mention web services.

I could go on, but you get the idea.
 
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