What support does ChiliSoft ASP offer for Java? What is the Chili!Bean technology? The Chili!Bean is technology that enables Java objects to be seamlessly incorporated into ASP-based business applications. Chili!Beans allow Java programmers to build business logic in Java objects and integrate them with ASP Web applications running on either WindowsÒ
NT/2000Ò
or UNIX, thus creating a truly open Web application platform.
How will corporations benefit from Chili!Beans? With Chili!Beans, companies can tap developers with Java expertise to create ASP-compatible objects without requisite knowledge of the native ASP object model (COM). Chili!Beans is designed to work with any version of Java that implements the Java Native Interface (JNI) specification. Companies can now draw from growing pools of talented Java and ASP programmers to rapidly develop dynamic, mission-critical Web applications. This gives corporate managers flexibility in allocating developer resources as well as significantly shortening the development cycle for Web server applications. Furthermore, Chili!Beans enables developers to integrate new or legacy technology such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) or CORBA into their ASP applications. The Chili!Bean is included with all Chili!Soft ASP products.
Why choose ASP over Java?
Use both! The answer to this question usually comes down to a judgement between whether working in a single development language, like Java or JSP, is better than working in an integrated development environment such as ASP. ASP allows you to leverage the best of each camp: leverage the extensive network of Visual Basic and ASP programmers for your ASP development, while leveraging both C/C++ and Java developers for your custom components.
In the case of ASP, you can take a page-oriented approach to development, which is familiar to most Web developers and leads to a shorter learning curve. With the page-oriented approach, you will have more flexibility in solving your development challenge; you will have a broader population of developers, novice to expert, from which to draw from, and more options in addressing a problem by using a combination of scripting and objects. All of this means less cost to you. You will have a broad choice of popular tools to use for building the application, and a larger community to help answer your development questions. And you’ll be able to create your application more quickly than with any other methodology.
ASP & the Competition
What are you competing with in the ASP space and why is your product better?
The only other third-party ASP implementation is Halcyon Software's iASP. Halcyon IASP is not very well known, nor do they have many installations in production. Primary problems with Halcyon’s iASP include:
iASP is not a true ASP implementation; rather, it emulates ASP in Java which results in a serious performance and scalability hit (Chili!Soft ASP is written natively to the specific operating system).
iASP does not support COM oEFutside of Windows NT (Chili!Soft ASP ships with either MainSoft’s COM layer or the Chili!Dog COM layer).
ASP applications require extensive modifications to run on iASP (Chili!Soft ASP is fully compatible with Microsoft ASP).
iASP supports JDBC instead of ODBC. All database interaction and ADO code needs to be extensively rewritten to run with JDBC (Chili!Soft ships with its own fully compatible ADO component; and thus utilizes ODBC just like the Microsoft version).
iASP is a first generation product (Chili!Soft ASP is in its third generation).
Once you add in the required support contract, iASP is more expensive than Chili!Soft ASP.
What differentiates Chili!Soft from other application servers? Chili!Soft is the industry’s first provider to enable ASP across the enterprise: the Chili!Soft ASP engine enables applications to operate on different Web servers and operating systems, including Netscape, Lotus and Apache Web servers for NT and Unix. Chili!Soft technology allows corporations to leverage developers of all skill sets to build Web applications, not just the few who master a single development language. And the open environment enables developers to use the tools and languages they want. Also, using Chili!Soft technology, corporations can now take advantage of their existing servers, databases, and code repositories for building Web applications, regardless of operating system.
Miscellaneous
What’s Chili!Soft’s vision for the future? Our lasting vision is to give developers the flexibility to build applications with Chili!Soft ASP and deploy them on the Web server or operating system of choice. To enable Chili!Soft ASP on all major platforms, establishing it as the de facto mainstream application server, and ensure that it continues to provide a robust solution to Service Providers, corporations, ISVs and partners.
Do you offer any consulting services? Only under very special circumstances such as requests from OEM, VAR partners and large corporate customers.
