What should I consider when choosing between JSP, ASP or servlet technologies?

The primary purpose of seperating content from design is to make the content editable by non-designers. This often means the use of a CMS (content management system), which is a large database-driven server application. Almost all CMS's run off a series of templates - the designer works on these, leading 'tags' for the content (the nature of these depends on which system is used), meaning that they do not need to be concerned with it, just to know that e.g there's a space 500 pixels wide here with body content, etc.

So the designer and the content editor can work entirely seperately, each within predefined parameters which are configured in the CMS, meaning that neither of them holds up the work of the other and everyone is more productive. At least in theory, anyway, as CMS systems can create a whole new set of problems, and I've seen huge websites virtually grind to a halt because of CMS problems. Some companies with smaller content editing requirements have even ripped them out entirely and gone back to the old 'designer is a bottleneck' method as it can be a great deal more cost effective and even faster ultimately.

In addition, with ASP.NET it is now apparently possible to host your ASP pages on Mono, eliminating the need for Windows serving.

In my experience (after about 5-year programming span for Web servers), the most important thing is not the scripting language, but the server itself.

The ASP on itself is not bad, especially if you have a bunch of VB programmers that can create some ActiveX components and use them like Beans in JSP. It gets even better with ASP.NET where you have access to the whole .NET framework classes.
The main drawback of ASP is that (until recently) it had to be run under Microsoft IIS platform, and believe me that you wouldn't want to do it. The amount of bugs in the implementation that allows anyone to launch DDoS or even a hostile takeover over your site makes it not very fit for a commercial Internet (or sometimes Intranet) applications. However, SUN launched a new initiative called ChiliASP that allows ASP to be run on Linux/UNIX servers.

JSP is an excellent tool that allows to reuse any Java code that you/anybody else wrote. About the beans - first of all they are really easy to learn, and second - you really don't have to use them.

Another excellent tool for C++ programmers is IIS's ability to run DLL's written in C++. The only drawback - the bugs in IIS implementation (almost every bug has an associated C code easily found via www.netcraft.com to exploit it).

So, just think about the consequences (and the chances) that someone will bring your server down, and go from there (not that Apache is bugfree, recently they had patch for DDoS flaw).

The key things here are portability, ease of implementation, and availability of coders (unless you're willing to learn the language and code yourself).

I personally prefer PHP over any of the other languages listed above, because it's open source, doesn't have ties to any other company, and is supported across the spectrum by a huge amount of developers and fellow coders. JSP is good, though more complex (as you have to write and compile Java servlets to perform more complex functions), and ASP I just plain dislike due to the obvious ties with Microsoft (and it's based on VBScript, which is an inherently insecure language :).


Apart from that, it's pretty much an even playing field - best to scope out some independent reviews of the languages and their advantages and disadvantages to choose exactly which one you want... I and other people will always have a slightly-biased view of which language is best, based on which one they code in =) One more thing to bear in mind: ASP servers (running Windows 2000 99% of the time) are usually more expensive to rent than Unix servers running PHP, so on a cost issue, I go with PHP again. It can also sometimes be hard to find a decent JSP or ColdFusion MX host, for example, whereas you can find a cornucopia of PHP and ASP-supporting hosts on the web.


But again, at the end of the day, it really is down to your personal choice - you should weigh up the pros and cons of each language and decide what you need to do for the task in hand. I just prefer PHP. :)