ASP2PHP

Typical Questions/Comments about asp2php

How can I help with asp2php development?

The best way to help is to report bugs. Just email me a small piece of code (less then 5 or 10 lines) of your asp code and the php code that should have been produced.

Moral and financial support too. The more positive email I get the more I want to work on asp2php. If you'd like to make a donation please use the PayPal link on the top.

Which database drivers does asp2php support?

MySQL
Oracle
ODBC
Postgres
Sybase

Does asp2php support MS SQL Server?

At this time, no. I do not plan on adding that in because I don't have copies of Windows NT or MS SQL to test it on. Yes, I know you can get trial versions of them, but if I'm going to do this I want to do it legal (full versions). Anyway, there are some alternatives to using PHP/MS-SQL Server support:

FreeTDS http://www.freetds.org/ will allow you to make connections to MS SQL Server databases through Sybase calls.
Oracle has a free tool to convert MS SQL Server databases into Oracle. You can find it at http://otn.oracle.com/tech/migration
ODBC is not a bad idea, but keep in mind that running through an ODBC layer slows things down. I found with the UnixODBC driver, Postgres and MySQL seem to go about 1/2 speed.
Convert your MS SQL Server database to MySQL or another database by creating database links through MS Access.

I have an access database and want to use PHP. What do I do?

You have two choices. If you run PHP on Windows you can use ODBC. Or there are programs that can convert your Access database into MySQL. You can download that from this link.

Will asp2php handle sessions?

Yes. Asp2php uses the built in PHP4 session features Please read the notes section for more info.

Will asp2php convert everything?

No. It's not finished and probably never will be 100% done. But it will do the best it can. If it doesn't convert something you can do those sections by hand or email me the problem and I will try and take care of it when I get a chance.

Will asp2php do COM objects that I made in VB or C?

ASP2PHP does not support COM objects.

Y2K and asp2php

When I wrote asp2php I was testing it with a copy of Windows 98 and PWS. When I would use the Now or the Date functions, ASP would return back the date in the form MM-DD-YY. Therefore I wrote asp2php to emulate this in the same way. I don't know if Microsoft fixed this problem in newer versions of ASP or not. I've been told there is a registry variable that can actually fix this in older versions, but I haven't had time to play with it. Therefore I added a -y2k option into asp2php that will convert dates assuming MM-DD-YYYY just in case.

I'm going to start writing a web app and use asp2php to convert it to PHP.

Bad idea. ASP2PHP was written to help you migrate to PHP if you've already made your pages with ASP. If you haven't started your web application yet the best idea is to write in PHP from the start, not convert it. The reason is asp2php is not perfect. There are still things that don't convert with it. Not only that but some things that do convert are not as optomized as they could be. For example if you had:

Response.ContentType="text/html"

asp2php would convert it to:

header("Content-type: "."text/html");

which obviously could have simply been written as header("Content-type: text/html"); There are reasons for this. Maybe in a future version i'll do optomizations for this.