Why even in 2022 classic ASP is a perfect toolset to build web applications
The answer is short: the ADO & ODBC tandem.
ADO is a programming interface to access data in a database. As from IIS 4 (Windows 98, PWS), the ADO programming interface ships with IIS as a built-in interface. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity. ODBC is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). It's available to any Windows operating system as from Windows 95. (source: Wikipedia)
Long story short: in classic ASP - when using the the IIS-built-in ADObjects - you can connect to any popular DBMS (Access, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, ...) by simply creating an ODBC connection on your local computer or server.
To use such DSN in your classic ASP application:
dim db : det db = Server.Createobject("ADODB.Connection")
db.Open "DSN=mySQL" (in case you named your ODBC connection "mySQL")
From there on, your can launch any CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) statement against your data. Both MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL provide 64bit ODBC drivers. So classic ASP developers benefit from the very latest bug fixes and improvements that come with every new release of any given ODBC driver.
This is amazing. And it somehow ensures that classic ASP is there to stay. Even if it's going nowhere. Perhaps ... because it's going nowhere. I really think so.
Happy coding!
- Sergio says: (04/02/2022 09:53:46)Hi Pieter,
a question since in the post you mention MySQL.
Can QS use a MySQL database? - Pieter says: (04/02/2022 09:58:56)Sergio, yes. It did back in 2008. But at that time, MySQL was not unicode-proof. So I dropped support for MySQL and kept support for SQL Server and Access only. Today I only use Access. And it works fine. Never had any issue with QS on Access ever since I decided to stop using SQL Server somewhere 3 years ago. I now host 300 QuickerSites on Access. No problems at all. This website also uses Access. I have customers with up to 10.000 unique visitors/day, on Access.
Why would you want to use MySQL for QS? - Sergio says: (04/02/2022 10:28:01)It was just a curiosity, and I was wondering why I hadn't given the option to use a MySQL database.
But now in your answer I understand.
I recently discovered this editor: https://code.visualstudio.com/ and with great pleasure it has support for asp classic (with plugins), maybe it can be useful for you. - Pieter says: (04/02/2022 12:14:30)Yes I know that editor. But I prefer Notepad++ for asp coding. For coding in general btw :)
