Classic ASP development

I work with a actively dev开发者_如何学编程eloped production web application that is written entirely in Classic ASP. Like most classic asp applications it is a mess full of spaghetti code. So I am beginning to break pieces into simple VB classes to gain some basic encapsulation benefits.

While creating the classes I feel conflicted that a higher level language to do so. Are there any recommendations on how this could be done? I have two thoughts:

COM Objects and Web services. I'm leaning towards the web service route but would greatly appreciate any suggestions on how to best encapsulate the business logic of a Classic ASP system into a higher level language.

What do you recommend?

As a start I recommend you read about MVC.

Then you can switch to a framework that support such a concept, such as the ASP.NET MVC and got even further by using a SoC tools, like Castle Windsor, NHibernate, etc.

If you don't want to embark on such a OMG start from scratch journey, then a web service will be the preferred solution for encapsulating the business logic. (following the model-view design pattern).

COM objects will be a bad solution for this task. They are not intended for web applications or logic management.

You might be interested in using ajaxed which has been built to support legacy classic asp apps.

I attempted to "simplify" a classic ASP site of mine a few months ago, primarily using COM objects. I didn't find the experience particularly satisfactory. I didn't have much time to devote to the project and I never got the development environment to gel properly so debugging etc was an ongoing pain. Writing the objects in C# was straight-forward but integrating them on the production server was a hassle.

In the end the I just cleaned up the data-access layer and related classes within Classic ASP itself. This definitely gave the best ROI in terms of time spent, etc.

I sometimes feel as if I ought to have a go at replacing some of the site with COM objects or similar, but I struggle to justify to myself why that'd be a good idea.

Anyway, regardless of the approach you take I'd suggest you ensure that your development process is as seamless as you can make it. This is not necessarily straight-forward when at least half of it will be classic ASP based.