Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

[Fulltimer]

On a server, A5 uses it's own unique file extension. Other languages use their own.

The question is, Can Alpha 5 actually have ASP (or PHP) code inside of it's web page and if so, how would the ASP parser know that the code even exists since its extension is that of A5?

I could not find any references to ASP here, at least not in the manner of mixing the two.

[Peter.Wayne]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

Alpha Five's web server cannot recognize or interpret other languages, any more than Microsoft's web servers will interpret Xbasic code.
However, if you absolutely have to mix code from two or more web servers, it can be done with something Alpha Software developed but is not generally selling. They have an Apache module which lets you run an Apache web server; you tell the Apache server that A5W pages are to be passed to Alpha Five to interpret, and php pages to PHP, and so forth. I don't believe Alpha is generally selling this but if you write to their customer service, maybe they'll sell you a copy.

[dmartens]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

Hi Peter,

Fulltimer didn't really ask whether A5 could parse and interpret PHP or ASP. As you note, that would require A5 to be a full ASP or PHP server as well as A5 server.

He seems to be asking if A5 can have ASP or PHP components within an A5 page. If I'm understanding his question correctly, then having Apache select which engine to use (A5 or PHP or ASP) at the page level won't suffice either.

That is not to say that your point is not interesting, because it is. Knowing that there could be page-level control for Apache is a nice bit of info to share. Thanks for that.

I'll go out on a limb here by suggesting that what Fulltimer wants to do should be possible if an ASP or PHP interpreter were placed between the A5 server and the outside world. In such a configuration, the A5 server could deliver html that included some PHP/ASP code to the ASP/PHP interpreter/server. This interpreter/server would replace the PHP/ASP code with that code's corresponding HTML output and deliver that to the client somewhere on the web.

The trick would be getting the A5 server to include whatever ASP/PHP code was desired. Since this would be text, essentially, getting something into the A5 HTML result wouldn't be hard. Formatting it to look good might be a little more involved. However, that detail can be left to experimentation.

Regards,
Dave

[Fulltimer]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

dmartens response to my original post is very close to correct. Having now a better understanding that there may be some concerns or special issues, I pose this follow-up question.

I'm running a Windows 2003 dedicated server located at a well know Hosting Provider. I do not want to "lease" another "box" just to run A5 Server. Am I correct that A5 Server can co-exist will an established IIS system. I seem to remember reading somewhere about a product called "Alway Open" or something like that which will keep the server running as a service.

Bottom line, I've got enough computing power. WILL, and DOES, A5 actually work in this environment?

Thanks,

[Steve Wood]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

AlwaysUP, from www.coretechnologies.com. Or for more options, visit my website under For Developers.

Your A5 server will run fine along with IIS, as long as they use different port numbers.

[dmartens]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

Fulltimer, you're going to have to configure the dedicated server to handle this properly for it to work. (Potentially obvious statement here:) Merely loading both servers on the same system won't be enough. However, if your dedicated server is configured properly, it _should_ work.

If you're looking for a definitive statement that it will work, you are really asking whether anyone has actually done this. Hopefully someone will chime in to that effect.

(Back to the world of speculation) I'm guessing that the right configuration would be for IIS to receive all port 80 requests coming in from the internet, have IIS route A5 page requests to the A5 WAS on the same machine, have A5 respond back to IIS, and for IIS to process any ASP in those pages before sending the response out to the web.

Your dedicated server provider has probably already figured out how to do this in the context of PHP/ASP, where IIS needs to allow the PHP engine to do some processing and then IIS does ASP processing on the result. You should be able to take this description to them and have them tell you if they will set you up to do this.

Admittedly, this is out of my realm but I am trying to get you closer to what you want to do.

Best,
Dave

[Steve Wood]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

IIS will not be involved in the process at all. You can ignore IIS, just set up Alpha on port 81 so it does not conflict. This is based on experience running this arrangement and following every discussion about it on the forum.

I have not heard of anyone using IIS to route traffic to Alpha, but would be happy to hear it can. You would still have to set up Alpha on a port other than 80, which IIS really demands.

I use Apache to route traffic to Alpha on port 81, so my clients do not see the port number in the URL. If you do not use Apache, and you do have Alpha on a port other than port 80, you WILL have to have the port number in the URL, as in www.mydomain.com:81/mypage.a5w.

I have some documentation on my website under For Developers regarding Hosting.

[dmartens]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

Steve, your response is helpful but speaks only to situations where someone had pages that were _either_ A5 or ASP. As you note, Apache could detect A5 or ASP file extensions on the requested page and then direct that response to the corresponding A5 or ASP server on different ports.

Here, fulltimer has pages that have both types of coding within the same page. For example, assume www.fulltimer.com had A5 _and_ ASP in its homepage. This homepage could be www.fulltimer.com/home.asp

On this basis, the A5 and ASP servers would need to be serialized rather than parallelized for both A5 and ASP to be properly translated to HTML from a single page (whose extension was either A5 or ASP).

Otherwise, a user request received by Apache for "home.asp" goes to IIS, which returns a response to Apache, which sends it to the user. Any A5 code in home.asp is never translated from A5 to HTML in that scenario.

In the same way that Apache can act as a traffic relay to other servers, IIS or A5 would need to accordingly relay traffic to A5 or IIS for this to work.

To the extent that someone can configure IIS to handle ASP and PHP in the same page (by IIS acting as a relay to the PHP engine), this is the same problem. I suspect someone has solved this problem but I don't know first-hand.

Regards,
Dave

[Steve Wood]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

I'm guilty of falling complacent from answering the same IIS/A5 question so often. I do have a server set up with IIS and A5 running on a different port, so I can help test if you give me some guidelines.

[mmaisterrena]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

When something seems so complicated even if its technicaly possibe it will be a very dificult to manage, and serializing both server applications will slow page load times. maybe frames could help in this situation but it will still be hard to manage

[dmartens]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

I found an example of doing what fulltimer is asking for in PHP but with parallel systems that Steve described:

http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02.../includes2.htm

This tutorial describes a type of PHP "include" statement that allows full http addresses as their target (e.g., www.fulltimer.com/home.php). This allowance, coupled with Steve's Apache configuration, would (apparently) work for what Fulltimer wants to do with PHP.

What I really mean here is that a PHP processor could do an include on an A5 page, which would spawn a transaction to the A5 WAS, which would return an A5 result with PHP added, which would be parsed/translated by the PHP server before being sent as a response to the original user. The differing ports for PHP and A5 would suffice to allow this on a single machine.

This is complicated as mmaisterrena noted, and would likely be noticably slower than conventional A5.

On a related note, I found some ASP discussion of this broader idea. Some people said they wanted ASP/PHP on the same page but the consensus conclusion appeared to be IIS could not be configured to handle the serialization issue. I don't know enough to agree or disagree.

Ultimately: this is complicated enough to suggest doing some other approach

Regards,
Dave

[Bill Parker]

Re: Mixing A5V8 with ASP or PHP?

Found this old thread when looking for PHP info. I wanted to respond to Steve Wood's comment about IIS and WAS not talking. I have an app with both IIS and WAS on the same box for about a year. IIS handles port 80, serving a default page with a link to a5w pages on port 443.

IIS is just there so users don't need to know to do https:// when accessing the Alpha page. But they work just fine together.

The only problem is to "persuade" IIS that it does not get to control both ports. There is a MS knowledgebase article about stopping IIS from listening on 443.

(Looking back over my info I did not find the knowledgebase article, but did find this link.)
disable port 443

Bill.