This product comes to solve some common problems for the ASP / VBScript programmers. Many developers need to protect their source code or improve its performance. With products like our ALP and its equivalents from other vendors ASP programming conquers the desktops as well - thus the code protection problem for the ASP developers becomes more important than ever before. As many people know there is no enough secure way to encrypt code and keep it functionality at the same time. Many tricks are possible, but they require many specific changes or installation of very specific software and the results are not something better then the old good binary executable files which in addition improve the performance by replacing the script with machine code.

Thus ASP Compiler (ASPC) is a cross compiler which allows you to convert ASP pages and other VBScript files to COM DLL-s. Working with our partners over applied projects we found that such products exist, but they do not cover all the VBScript 5.0 features thus we decided to build our own compiler. ASPC supports approximately all the features found in VBScript 5.0 and allows extended programming techniques to be used. It supports VBScript classes, Functions/Subs, Constants, With statements and so on. Also it supports not only ASP but also WSH (Windows Scripting Host) and through custom configuration VBScripts for any other script host working with plain VBScript files or ASP-like files. In With additional parser configuration or/and new parser components ASPC can be extended to support another scripting environments and we will publish such updates as minor updates or additions.

What ASPC does with your ASP pages? Of course it performs ASP parsing of the <% %> tags, then it analyzes the structure of your page (or another VBScript code) and generates the appropriate VB (Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0) code and project files for it. COM DLL-s (no matter what language is used to write them) have different structure than the ASP pages or other VBScripts. Thus ASPC changes your statements as appropriate and adds some code where needed to change the structure of your program to match the requirements and logic required by VB which keeps the same functionality. This includes connecting the VBScript classes with the creator class which is generated from the base part of your page (if VBScript classes are used), selects right place for the defined variables, constants and routines and so on. In fact a simple ASP page with only few Functions and Subs in it require approximately small amount of changes but when VBScript classes are used then ASPC makes considerable changes the page/script and makes a set of COM classes in place of the source page. You can read details in the included help file and review the sample projects (installed in a separate directory - see the link in the program group after the installation).

Besides the other features ASPC supports some pre-processing options not related to the DLL creation - such as SSI (Server Side Includes) files pre-processing to plain HTML (can be useful for help/documentation creation), ASP to plain script conversion - an ASP file with only two <% %> tags in the beginning and the end - which may improve the performance without creating DLL (can be useful for frequently used include ASP files - mostly used as library of functions in many pages for example). Simple copy operation - to help you to pack all the files in one project if this is more convenient for you in certain case (the samples use that feature to make easier to test them).

ASPC supports also a set of directives which may help advanced developers to do more with it. For example experienced developer may build COM utility components for wide usage in many projects, or build an ActiveX from plain VBScript file. ASPC samples included concentrate on such kind of ideas. Another interesting application is building components used in non-WEB applications (for example VB, Delphi or C++ applications) for HTML/XML generation for example. One good example is export plug-in to HTML format.

Requirements: Windows 98/SE/ME or Windows NT4/2000/XP. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (SP3 recommended but not required). Scripting run-time libraries - File system object (If you have problems with them - download the latest Active Scripts from Microsoft).

Created DLL(s) deployment requirements: VB run-time library (exist on most of the machines besides the other products or system tools). Other requirements depend on the components you use in your code - for example if your scripts use ADO it will be a requirement for them too.

Scripts and hosts are supported: Only VBScript is supported, most script hosts are supported - unless they do not require scripts to be placed in formats other than plain text or ASP. Additional formats will be supported in future. Created components do not depend on COM+ (or MTX) interfaces and functions or the IIS specific script interfaces. Thus projects can be adopted to any host by editing the set namespace objects in the project settings. For example there are alternative ASP servers/processors which support part of the standard ASP namespaces (Request, Response and so on) or support additional ones - ASPC project can be configured to match their limitations/features.