Designing Active Server Pages

What’s Wrong with ASP Design?

In my consulting experience, I have found that many developers don’t spend any time working on the design of their scripts. Rather, they just start coding once they have an understanding of what the web site needs to look like and what tasks it needs to accomplish.

Such an approach is inefficient and error-prone. If no thought is dedicated to determining the design of the ASP scripts before they are actually written, then for each similar script, the developer essentially reinvents the wheel. For example, imagine the developer has four ASP scripts that need to make modifications to a database. While these scripts may not be identical, assume they all have many functional similarities. Why should the developer spend the time to create each page separately, when one generic page would do?

There is a direct correlation between the amount of code you write and the number of bugs in your program. Typos and silly mistakes catch us all, and they occur proportionally to the amount of raw source code actually written. If we can reduce the number of total ASP scripts that need to be written by generalizing certain scripts to handle the functionality present in the previous four, we will create less buggy ASP applications.

Furthermore, intelligent ASP script design will not only save time and bugs in our current project, but also in future projects. Once a robust module is written to handle a specific task, if that task needs to be completed in a future project, ...