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Developing Scalable ASP Applications

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Proper Use of ASP

With ASP, you can easily and quickly create Web applications, in a fraction of the time it would take with a more conventional server-side language, such as C or C++.

However, the ease with which you can create ASP-based applications belies the complexity of the server processing and client-server interaction required by that application. It is possible that Web applications that have been created with extensive ASP scripting will not scale well.

To avoid scalability problems, there are two points to keep in mind when developing with ASP:

  • ASP is the "Glue"
  • ASP should not be used for business logic

The first point emphasizes that ASP dovetails with HTML, client-side scripting using DHTML, and XML to create a powerful platform for interacting with the user. ASP scripting was designed to be used to bind the user interface to the business logic of the Web application, and ASP was optimized for these sorts of tasks.

The second point should serve as an important reminder: If you find that most of your business logic is embedded into the ASP, your application will probably not scale properly. It is true that ActiveX scripting languages, hosted by ASP, are capable of accomplishing a great deal of business logic processing. However, if the business logic required for your Web application is more than trivial, then that business logic should be folded into a new COM component, rather than embedded in ASP scripts.

Optimizing ASP on IIS

Once you have established that your use of ASP is appropriate for the design of your application, and you have encapsulated the bulk of your business logic into COM components, there are two avenues by which you can further improve the performance and scalability of your Web application: