Blue World Communications has gone on the offensive against Microsoft in the war of database serving on the Internet. The company has released a White Paper (a White Paper is a technical treatment of a particular subject) called Lasso Vs. ASP. According to Blue World Communications:
Blue World Communications, Inc. today announced a new white paper comparing the Blue World Lasso Web Data Engine to Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). The 38 page report includes detailed coverage of the following key topics of interest to Web application developers: ease-of-use, speed of development, performance, security, extensibility and integration with leading visual HTML editors such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive. Authored by Lasso and ASP expert programmer and consultant Josh Hoover, the report provides detailed side-by-side code comparisons, screen shots and performance benchmarks.
The Lasso vs. ASP report shows why hundreds of thousands of Web developers use Lasso technology to power their database-driven web sites, said Bill Doerrfeld, president and CEO of Blue World. This white paper will further increase awareness as to the significant ease-of-use, performance, security, interoperability and extensibility advantages of using Lasso over ASP.
Fast, Easy and Consistent
Lasso outpaced ASP by as much as 250% in benchmark tests comparing performance on common routines such as adding, editing and deleting records in a Microsoft SQL Server database running on Windows NT. Lasso eases the process of Web-enabling databases through numerous automated database connectivity routines. The Lasso Dynamic Markup Language (LDML) or Lasso Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS) can be used for both database access as well as server-side programming. With ASP, database access is achieved via a combination of the ADO component (with multiple parts) and SQL statements; server-side programming requires either VBScript or JScript. Lassos consistent coding approach for both data access as well as server-side scripting significantly eases Web application development and troubleshooting.
Slim, Secure and Well Connected
In a side-by-side comparison of code required to display the results of a basic yet common search query, the Lasso page resulted in 42 lines of code and the ASP page 269 lines, over 640% more code than with Lasso. For example, Lasso automatically creates links to next and previous sets of records in a found set with two tags whereas ASP requires dozens of lines of custom code to accomplish the same. Also, Lasso provides a robust built-in security system for protection of databases, columns, rows and actions whereas ASP provides no built-in security. What's more, Lasso is available in multiple configurations on multiple platforms whereas ASP is available with one Web server on one platform (without the additional cost of third-party add-ons).
Integration with Dreamweaver and GoLive
Because Lasso utilizes LDML, a tag-based language very similar to HTML, Lasso pages are easily edited within leading visual HTML editors such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive. Because ASP is dependent upon scripting languages such as VBScript and JScript, editing ASP pages within visual HTML editors is significantly more difficult. The Lasso Studio for Dreamweaver Web application authoring environment will further ease the process of building sophisticated database-driven web sites within a familiar, leading visual web site authoring program.