Question:
We have several applications developed in VB. What are the best alternatives for making these applications Web-enabled, and what are the advantages and problems associated with them.
Answer:
If you are familiar with VB and you are using Microsoft Internet Information Server then I recommend you use Active Server Pages.
You will have to redo the UIs in HTML. If you can limit the app to IE, then you can take advantage of IE’s support of DHTML and do some client side processing. If you have to support both Netscape and IE, then doing client side processing will be a pain in the neck because they have different DHTML object models. You can run business functionality as VBScript in the ASP pages, or you can compile it into an ActiveX DLL and call it from the ASP pages. You can access your database from the ASP pages or DLLs that you instantiate.
