> Since the scripting all stays on the server, the issue of portability is not
> an issue unless you can find a platform that supports ASP pages, but not the
> default scripting language of VB script.
>
> Unless you have a good reason not to use VBScript, I would stick with it.
> Most of the examples you will find will be with VBScript.
What he says is true, but not completely.
You may consider it useful to be able to reuse your code in another
project, or to be able to move to a non-microsoft server at some point
in the future. Being tied to a specific vendor's software is normally
considered a big problem.
JScript is a standard, only somewhat annoying language, and will
probably be supported by other servers, whereas VBScript is a
downright decrepit language that will probably never be supported by
anyone but Microsoft.
Perl is, well, what it is, but it's already available on all different
platforms, which could be a big win.
Server side Java applets are called "servlets", and the API is
standardized and supported by a variety of web servers. It's also a
lot more powerful than ASP. If you're just serving html with a little
dynamic content and you're using IIS now it's probably not worth it,
but if you're doing any complicated algorithms to generate pages or
you're generating documents in formats other than html then you may
want to look at servlets.
greg