UMRA – ASP - ASP.NET - PHP - Portal Design

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If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – ASP - ASP.NET - PHP - Portal Design

Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting a lot of emails on “what are the different ways you can create a UMRA Web Portal, and what ways do I prefer to create my portal for my clients in”. Well, first off lets me say that you can create a UMRA Web Portal in many different methods, such as ASP with VBScript, ASP.NET using VBScript of C#, even PHP. It really depends on what your clients platform for development. Since UMRA is a Windows Based product, and always installed on a Windows OS, all the portals I’ve developed have either been in ASP or ASP.Net. Does this mean you can use PHP to develop a portal in….no. If you client allows for additional modules to be loaded into IIS to allow the parsing of PHP, then by all means code in PHP. So to answer the second part of the emails I’ve been getting “what do I prefer for my portal creations”. I prefer to use just classic ASP using VBScript to create my portals in. Why not user ASP.net you ask? Well, most of our UMRA Web Portal approaches don’t rely on any enhancement that ASP.net brings to the table, plus when it’s time to turn over the UMRA Web Portal to the client, they will need to install additional software onto their serer, which in some cases is not an option. Now, I know some of you are saying “but you can edit .aspx pages in notepad, however, with a very complex design in your UMRA Web Portal this task is almost impossible.

UMRA – Classic ASP Using VBScript

Out of all the UMRA Web Portals I’ve built most have been in ASP using VBScript, with the exception of a few done in ASP.net. I’ll give you a few reasons on why I develop this way.

Lots of Resources
When developing a portal, you’re going to run into a process or you will have to create some process that UMRA might not be able to handle, so you will have to design something from scratch. Since ASP Classic has been out for a while, there are a TON of resources online, for almost anything your trying to do. In most cases the VBScript will be done for you, all you have to do is either tweak a few parameters, or copy/paste right into your UMRA Web Portal webpage.

Ease of Use
So there are 2 sides to this reason. One is the ease of use for the client. In most cases, our clients VM or machine we are developing on, we are not allowed to install software, and if we do, we have to go through a lot of hurdles and downtime for this. So with ASP Classic, we can edit he pages in notepad, with relative ease. Unlike ASP.net where you might have to install additional software free or not, upgrading or changing the use of the .net framework, to handle any page edits the client would like to make.

Now some of you still might be thinking, or saying come on move to the new technology with the .NET framework. Now, trust me I am all for using the latest and greatest to build my projects, however UMRA is doing all the "hard work" for us that the .NET framework would do. What I mean by "hard work" is, connecting to Active Directory, and doing some type of action on an object. Now, this applies to any object or downstream system that you might be integrating with your UMRA implementation. So an example of this would be doing some type of file manipulation, sure .NET can do it, but so can UMRA. UMRA is more then an active directory object manipulation tool, it can handle file objects, moving, deleteing, creaing, seting security etc. Plus UMRA has the ability to call sript from the command line, such as vbsripts, and now it fully supports powershell. So if there is something you want to do that uses the .NET framework, you can now just create a PowerShell script that does what your looking for, and the call it from within UMRA in your application. So I guess what is really comes down to is what do you want UMRA to handle, and what do you want to handle with code. If you want to handle alot of your actions with code, then use asp, php etc, however doing your actions within UMRA now give you the ability to edit these actions easily and quickly. So keep this in mind, if you want to learn how to do the complete piping of webpage to You wont need to hire a web programmer to edit these pages when you want to make simple changes, you can now edit your functions within UMRA with simple drag and drop actions, instead of recoding some webpage, and hoping it works. Now, dont get me wrong here, sometimes it easier or even faster to do something in code, then rather doing another call to UMRA to do your action. For example, if you wanted to check if a file exsists, as most of you know you can do this with a three or four line piece of code in asp, php, or .net. Doing this through the code it speeds up execution time, and saves you some overhead of having to manage one or two UMRA Portal Pages and one or two UMRA projects.
So as you can see there are pros / cons of doing it all in these different ways. Now it migh sound like I dont like to code anything in .NET however this could be far from the truth. I plan to move all my current projects over to .NET most of mine are now, but not fully modularized like I would like them. So what can you expect to see me coding my projects done in .NET and classics asp.

Now if some of you are wondering what I code my UMRA Portal Pages in, depending on what I am coding in asp, php, .net it will depend on my applications. Here are a few of the free applications you can use that are free. NotePad++, CofeeCup, and Visual Web Developer. If you want to go up to a more robust web editing tool, you can use Adobe CS4 suite, or get Dreamweaver. So depending on what you feel comfortable with, you can use any of the above applications to manage your UMRA Portal Pages.

So I hope this answers some questions you might have when getting ready to develop your UMRA Web Portal. Overall, you can create your portal in what best fits your current development environment, sometimes you are stuck with using a specific coding technique, and sometimes you get to pick and choose.