[tech] Converting ASP to PHP?

[Morrus]

Anyone know much about this? Would it be a major job, or is it fairly simple?

If/when I move everything over to the Cyberstreet server, the ASP pages won't work (the Cyberstreet server is Linux), so I'm going to need to convert the reviews pages over. Also Scott's Creature Catalog is ASP.

The other option I thought of was to install something like ChilliASP on the Cyberstreet server. My only concern would be server load - would that add to it significantly? And would I just be able to port everything across fairly painlessly if I did that?

Any advice would be welcome!

 

[Horacio]

In my experience (did the change for my Planewalker-es site) it's not very difficult, both languages are rather similar.

 

[Psionicist]

It can be quite painful to convert large databases/systems from ASP to PHP, so I'd recommend you to install ASP on your linux server. Also, you need to install Ms Access support, unless you know how to convert your mdb files to MySQL (or whatever), which I don't. And If you figure it out, you have to rewrite all the code.

So in short, install ASP and Ms Access support.

 

[Morrus]

How will that affect the server, though? It's already running the messageboards and, now, a Nuke site. Or does it not make any difference?

 

[Horacio]

It can be quite painful to convert large databases/systems from ASP to PHP, so I'd recommend you to install ASP on your linux server. Also, you need to install Ms Access support, unless you know how to convert your mdb files to MySQL (or whatever), which I don't. And If you figure it out, you have to rewrite all the code.

So in short, install ASP and Ms Access support.

I tend to disagree with you, maybe it will be a bit more long and painful, but the result will be, IMHO, better if he pass everything to php. O.K., maybe with a huge site like EN World it will be painful, but better.

YMMV, of course...

Disclaimer: I truely hat MS Access

 

[Morrus]

MS Access sometimes dies with large numbers of simultaneous connections does it not? I'm thinking a PHP-MySQL system would be better for long term growth.

Of course, however hard you think it might be to convert it - it's 10 times harder for me!

 

[pensiv]

you should be able to output the contents of the MS Access database as a large group of SQL statements. That text can then be used to generate a MySQL database fairly easily.

Migrating to PHP from ASP requires that the person doing the work knows both languages and has the time to do so.

 

[Plane Sailing]

As a datum, I program in ASP as my day job, and when I looked at PHP out of curiousity it seemed *very* different in syntax. I certainly wouldn't fancy converting all my ASP pages to PHP, and your d20reviews pages don't look as if they are particularly simple.

Still, if Horacio has been able to do it, it might be worth seeing if he fancies a look over your asp code, to see how similar it looks to the stuff he has converted in the past?

Cheers

 

[Psionicist]

I tend to disagree with you, maybe it will be a bit more long and painful, but the result will be, IMHO, better if he pass everything to php. O.K., maybe with a huge site like EN World it will be painful, but better.

YMMV, of course...

Disclaimer: I truely hat MS Access

Well of course it will be better with PHP and MySQL. I love that combination and use it on all my projects. The problem is, it won't convert itself just like that. Someone have to do it. I do know ASP/Access as well as PHP and MySQL, but don't count on me because converting large systems like this is not only boring, it's REALLY boring.

My point is, it's not worth it. ASP is just as fast in a *nix environemnt as in windows (mostly because of IIS).

 

[Psionicist]

you should be able to output the contents of the MS Access database as a large group of SQL statements. That text can then be used to generate a MySQL database fairly easily.

Migrating to PHP from ASP requires that the person doing the work knows both languages and has the time to do so.

It is not that simple. MySQL has a HUGE ammount of different "lengths"/types of fields, not only text and numbers as Ms Access databases. To copy paste, here's a list:

"TINYINT",
"SMALLINT",
"MEDIUMINT",
"INT",
"BIGINT",
"FLOAT",
"DOUBLE",
...
snip
...
"BLOB",
"MEDIUMBLOB",
"MEDIUMTEXT",
"LONGBLOB",
"LONGTEXT",
"ENUM",
"SET"

Yeah, you CAN use "text" for all texts in the DB and "mediumint" for all numbers, but that will certainly slow things down as well as enlarge the database.

If someone is kind enough, extract some SQL data from a MS Access database, then compare it with this dump from MySQL:

(hold on, I will edit it in later)