[CLUE-Tech] ASP alternative.

[David Anselmi]

I know a little about ASP, and version 2 of ASP .NET seems to be a 
considerable improvement (time will tell, it's alpha at the moment). 
But I could use some of its functionality.  So what's the best way to 
get that on Linux?

Here's an example.  In ASP, a few lines of code run a database query and 
a few more hook it into a "datagrid control" (most of that can be done 
drag and drop but that isn't too important).

Then the datagrid can be placed on a web page (it looks like an html 
element) and when rendered it will display a table with the results of 
the query.  It isn't terribly hard to make the table alternate row 
colors, have a header and footer, or sort by column when the user clicks 
it (they even do autoformatting ala Word, but that's just automatic code 
generation).  And you can put your input form and your output data on 
the same page pretty easily.

So what can I use on Linux to easily build forms that enter and display 
data?

I expect that JSP can do this.  When I used it a few years ago they had 
the technology, just not a good library of components.  Maybe they're 
better now.

PHP pages seem similar to ASP (less so to ASP .NET), but it doesn't seem 
quite object oriented enough to me.  Still...

I recently used Perl's DBI module.  That was cool, it was like my second 
day of Perl and I managed to insert data from a text file in to several 
related tables.  I guess PL/pgSQL might have done the same, but probably 
reading from the file would have been harder.  So it would be cool to be 
able to use Perl objects in a web page.

Another possibility is Zope, I guess.  But it looked a lot like early 
JSP when I looked at it a while ago.

I guess that if I had to start from scratch and make my own components 
I'd use JSP (what a waste, everyone else must be doing the same thing). 
  So who knows a better way?

Thanks!
Dave