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Using Headless Chrome in classic ASP

UPDATE: I turned this into a GitHub repository. Make sure to give it a try and
report any issue! Thanks!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For a customer, I needed to create pdf files in my classic ASP web app. After
looking into both commercial and free PDF creating software, I found out that it
can easily be done with Headless Chrome. For free!

You need to have Chrome installed on your computer/server.

Here's the code:

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<% 'This classic ASP script launches headless Chrome to create PDF files and JPG
screenshots of any webpage. 'Needs to run with administrator permissions.
'Requires a folder (D:\Chrome in this script) for the Chrome user to store logs
Dim oShell : Set oShell = server.CreateObject ("WSCript.shell") dim command
command="cmd /k " command=command & "cd C:\Program Files
(x86)\Google\Chrome\Application " 'export as PDF command=command & "&&
chrome.exe --user-data-dir=D:\Chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=" &
server.mappath("output.pdf") & " https://www.quickersite.com " 'make a
screenshot command=command & "&& chrome.exe --user-data-dir=D:\Chrome --headless
--disable-gpu --screenshot=" & server.mappath("screenshot.jpg") & "
--window-size=1920,1080 https://www.quickersite.com " command=command & " &&
exit " response.write "<p>The following command is about to be launched in a
command-line:</p><p><strong>" & command & "</strong></p>" response.flush
oShell.run command,,true 'true -> wait for the script to finish completely Set
oShell = Nothing %>

view raw chrome.asp hosted with ❤ by GitHub

In short, this script launches a command line app, changes the directory to the
chrome application, runs Chrome with the parameters needed and finally creates a
PDF file from the QuickerSite website. Not only a PDF is generated. I also added
a screenshot. "Exit" closes the cmd line app. 

Don't get too excited though. This only works if your IUSR has the necessary
permissions. This will never work on shared hosting. But if you run your own
Windows Server, this might help you out. You also have to create a folder
("D:\Chrome" in this case) where the Chrome user can dump its logs and errors.
That's it! 

Creating PDF files and images on the fly is something I'm looking for for quite
a while in classic ASP. It looks like having this headless Chrome-thing at my
fingertips, is going to help a lot! The most exciting thing about this, is that
classic ASP developers are - for once - not forced to use outdated or badly
supported COM dll's. This is Chrome people... probably the best software on the
planet. Being able to use Chrome features like creating PDF files and generating
(complex) images from any HTML is a big thing. Have fun!

28/02/2023 22:09:10 | Pieter | Login | Replies (0)
Classic ASP forever.

For me personally 2022 was a good year. I made some new friends. A new band. New
great development in Classic ASP. For my employer in Belgium, I built a big
application on top of aspLite. aspLite turns out to be the most versatile and
powerful AJAX-library I've ever written for Classic ASP. It could even get much
better if other Classic ASP developers would join and contribute. Most Classic
ASP developers however feel too much shame about being stuck with a dead
technology. But they shouldn't. Classic ASP is going nowhere. And that's exactly
what makes it a very attractive and solid technology. I hope MicroSoft never
touches it again actually... they would mess it up no doubt.

For nearly 10 years now, QuickerSite is in idle mode. And more and more I tend
to look at this as an asset, a "selling point". No bugs. No security issues. No
critical updates. No urgent hotfixes or patches. QS is fine as it is. And the
longer this takes, the better it's looking. I have setup a couple new
QuickerSites in 2022. I used QS for a formbuilder (basically only using it for
all sorts of forms) and another acts as an online journal, reconverting the QS
catalogs to a basic library-manager. Nothing spectacular. But very efficient and
nobody cares or even knows it's classic ASP and nothing but QS in the back. Love
it.

I do feel like bringing Bootstrap 5 into the QS backsite would be a great idea
though. And it would not necessarily be too complex. It would not cause any
security or any other blocking issue in any way. But it would drastically
improve backsite usability and looks count too. It would also be great to
finally get rid of anything that still relies on or refers to Artisteer. Teaming
up with Artisteer was the worst decision I ever made in QS. I should rather have
chosen Bootstrap back in 2010. Bootstrap could have been a major selling point
for QS. Artisteer never was.

Happy 2023 to all of you!

Pieter

02/01/2023 15:24:34 | Pieter | Login | Replies (1)
 * David says: (06/01/2023 02:01:45)
   
   And a happy new year from Kiwiland... Well done for all your achievements
   Pieter, at 70yrs I'm starting to wind down a bit, but still active.
   Bootstrapping the QS Backsite sounds like a great idea, site editors will
   love it :-)
   

QuickerSite and Windows Server 2022

I have recently installed QuickerSite on a Windows Server 2022 (hosted on
Azure). No problems as such. Still the exact same things to keep in mind:

 * Install IIS and ASP using the Server Manager
 * Enable 32-bit applications in the IIS application pool
 * make sure permissions are set (ie make sure Everyone has full permissions on
   the fysical directory of your QS)

But I faced another problem. There is a bug in the built-in SMTP server.  In
short: it does not work. I hope MicroSoft will fix that in the coming months.
But I doubt so. The built-in SMTP server dates back from Windows 2003 and still
needs IIS6 to configure it. I guess it's time to move away from that SMTP
server. I installed a 3rd party SMTP server named MailEnable. I used MailEnable
before on a Windows 2008 Server. So far so good.

To summarize: QuickerSite is fully compatible with Windows Server 2022. But you
need a 3rd party SMTP server to get the emails working. That's some good news at
last. 

02/08/2022 10:13:12 | Pieter | Login | Replies (2)
 * David says: (26/08/2022 07:56:04)
   
   Good to know, still plenty of life left in QS :-)
   
   Is the upgrade script on this site still valid when upgrading using the
   codebase hosted on Github?
   
 * Pieter says: (26/08/2022 08:41:46)
   
   Sure David
   

Pre-summer 2022 blog post. What a blogpost-title?!

I feel like ... writing a blog post. It's been ages.

asplLite is doing pretty wel. It's doing great actually. I get very promising
feedback from users all over the world on a regular base. asplite is also very
well received on Github with nearly 40 stars. Not bad for classic ASP
development. I'm currently working on a first huge web application using
aspLite and the results are very satisfying. aspLite is reliable, bugfree, fast,
lightweight, secure, slick. Especially the ajax formbuilder is a huge step in
the right direction when it comes to modern web applications built in classic
ASP. And Bootstrap... I love Bootstrap, no doubt one of the most powerful
CSS-frameworks around.

Did I mention this before? Classic ASP being left for dead by M$ has caused it
to be one of the most stable and secure web development frameworks around. No
upgrades, no fixes and no security issues basically means: no surprises and no
headaches for our applications. They just keep on running. Always. Go tell
WordPress users. 

On a sidenote, I won a regional singer-songwriter contest few months ago. As a
result, I'm having much fun performing on lots of stages these days. In a few
weeks from now, I'll be performing on a TV show with over 1.000.000 viewers.
Looking forward to that. There was a time that I was dreaming of being as
successful as a singer/songwriter then I was back then as a web developer. Today
it's the other way around. It turns out that the grass is always greener on the
other side after all :)

Cheers! Pieter

04/06/2022 14:29:17 | Pieter | Login | Replies (0)
Why even in 2022 classic ASP is a perfect toolset to build web applications

The answer is short: the ADO & ODBC tandem.

ADO is a programming interface to access data in a database. As from IIS 4
(Windows 98, PWS), the ADO programming interface ships with IIS as a built-in
interface. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity. ODBC is a standard
application programming interface (API) for accessing database management
systems (DBMS). It's available to any Windows operating system as from Windows
95. (source: Wikipedia)

Long story short: in classic ASP - when using the the IIS-built-in ADObjects -
you can connect to any popular DBMS (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, ...)
by simply creating an ODBC connection on your local computer or server.

To use such DSN in your classic ASP application:

dim db : det db = Server.Createobject("ADODB.Connection")
db.Open "DSN=mySQL" (in case you named your ODBC connection "mySQL")

From there on, your can launch any CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) statement
against your data. Both MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL provide 64bit
ODBC drivers. So classic ASP developers benefit from the very latest bug fixes
and improvements that come with every new release of any given ODBC driver.

This is amazing. And it somehow ensures that classic ASP is there to stay. Even
if it's going nowhere. Perhaps ... because it's going nowhere. I really think
so.

Happy coding!

04/02/2022 09:34:22 | Pieter | Login | Replies (4)
 * Sergio says: (04/02/2022 09:53:46)
   
   Hi Pieter,
   a question since in the post you mention MySQL.
   Can QS use a MySQL database?
   
 * Pieter says: (04/02/2022 09:58:56)
   
   Sergio, yes. It did back in 2008. But at that time, MySQL was not
   unicode-proof. So I dropped support for MySQL and kept support for SQL Server
   and Access only. Today I only use Access. And it works fine. Never had any
   issue with QS on Access ever since I decided to stop using SQL Server
   somewhere 3 years ago. I now host 300 QuickerSites on Access. No problems at
   all. This website also uses Access. I have customers with up to 10.000 unique
   visitors/day, on Access.
   
   Why would you want to use MySQL for QS?
   
 * Sergio says: (04/02/2022 10:28:01)
   
   It was just a curiosity, and I was wondering why I hadn't given the option to
   use a MySQL database.
   But now in your answer I understand.
   I recently discovered this editor: https://code.visualstudio.com/ and with
   great pleasure it has support for asp classic (with plugins), maybe it can be
   useful for you.
   
 * Pieter says: (04/02/2022 12:14:30)
   
   Yes I know that editor. But I prefer Notepad++ for asp coding. For coding in
   general btw :)
   

Well, some good news too...

Classic ASP is now an official language on GitHub. Guess who's responsible...
Over 3500 repositories to browse through... and learn from. aspLite is in 10th
position when it comes to stars.

21/01/2022 08:49:15 | Pieter | Login | Replies (0)
Wordpress? Thank you but no thank you.

For a customer I need to babysit 6 WordPress websites. Shocking results after 1
full year of babysitting:

 * in total, a handful plugins suddenly stopped working (forcing me to disable
   automatic updates)
 * sites went down completely due to badly working plugins
 * websites got hacked for unexplicable reasons and needed to revert to backups.

1 year... This is a joke. QuickerSite hasn't been upgraded since 2014. Not a
single issue. Guess to which CMS I will migrate these 6 sites....

21/01/2022 08:37:38 | Pieter | Login | Replies (2)
 * Pieter says: (02/02/2022 19:45:13)
   
   whooops once again. a WP site, 18 plugins. all up-to-date. 1 plugin causes
   the complete site to crash.
   
   you have no idea how often i had to update wp_options and set active_plugins
   to a:0:{} already...
   
   What. A. Mess.
   
 * JohnW says: (25/04/2022 16:15:09)
   
   Were you running them on IIS? I have to support a couple of Wordpress sites
   on a Windows server. I find that WP out of the box works like a dream on IIS
   but there are issues with some of the plugins because the developers have
   only ever tested the thing in a UNIX environment. With the plugins which were
   hang when you try to update them I find you can get around it by downloading
   the zip, opening it and dropping the directory it contains into the
   appropriate place in File Manager.
   
   There's also a site I run written in classic asp, but that isn't obvious
   because I use URL rewriting. Every so often I find 404 errors in the server
   logs which are the result of someone (or something) looking for a non
   existent WP login page. I'm tempted to add a page which fits the URL and put
   a rude message on it.
   

Happy 2021!

Few weeks ago I received this message. It really meant something to me. So I
decided to share, as an alternative Happy new year wish. Happy New Year BTW!

"Pieter, many years ago I came across Quickersite and I payed I think for
something (I hope I was a payer and not just a downloader) and I was overwhelmed
with how amazing it all was. I thought I'd found the holy grail for me being a
provider of web services... but my history has followed a similar trajectory to
QS and I'm now wandering the plains with a lot of other buffaloes wondering what
to do next. I read your posts occasionally as they are, and for a weird reason -
it gives me hope. Hope because what you had going here was SO ON THE MARK. But
the world rotated a little in another direction and twitter/FB / Instablah and
all the other mindless platforms took the collective consciousness away from
individual effort and relevant opinion, such that QS no longer had a home. ...
Why? Who knows, the world is just different now and windows of opportunity open
and close for the most inexplicable of reasons. This could of course be used as
an equal answer to: "Why does humanity exist"? A: "For inexplicable reasons".
So; no more Concorde, no more digital watches, no more moon landings and no more
QS. It is in good company and I loved it."

04/01/2021 13:51:17 | Pieter | Login | Replies (0)
Single release

Hi fellows of QuickerSite,

It took a while again to come up with a new blog post. It sure seems like I’ve
doing basically nothing lately. And even if that’s the case for most of the
time, I DID come up with some ideas to break the extreme boredom of my life.

For some reason, in the past week, a single of one my songs got released on
YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. And it is airplayed on a bunch of
local radio stations in both Belgium and The Netherlands. Go figure. And I’m
even in it for nothing. I got amazing support from a friend musician, my
bass-player actually.

It’s a Dutch song about the huge collection of old, wrong and lost loves of my
live. There are a few dozens. 

Please be my guest and discover, enjoy and SHARE as much as you can. I love you!

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/petecorman
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/be/artist/pieter-cooreman/1294423452
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6v3B1qel8jsKLI8cl4ZBY3
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/en/artist/13348657
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pietercooremanmusic
Website: https://www.pietercooreman.be

18/09/2020 12:52:50 | Pieter | Login | Replies (1)
 * Pieter says: (18/09/2020 12:43:52)
   
   on a side note... the entire production, recording and mixing was done with a
   39$ tool that Nick sent over as a Xmas gift in ... 2011. No kiddin!
   

Summer of 2020

Today I built a website for a customer again… finally. The last site I did dates
back from a couple of months ago. It really feels like I’m retiring. But I’m
not, nowhere near actually.

I did it in Mobirise - the free edition - even though I have a commercial
license. That’s because I want my customers to be able to take over the site
after I hand it over. 

Some say Mobirise is boring. And that’s true. Especially the free edition is…
plain stupid & simple. But it works. Customers DO understand how to drag/drop a
block, add an image, edit a text, and next click publish. So they’re happy.

I have 2 accounts at Mobirise. One for my commercial license, the other for the
free one. All it takes is 2 different email addresses. Not very complicated in
the end. But you also need 2 different computers to handle this. And that’s a
little annoying.

It sure looks like Wix is everywhere these days. They must have a very appealing
reseller/affiliation program. I personally think Wix is extremely expensive
compared to self hosted solutions like WP, Mobirise or QuickerSite.

Talking about QS… It still hurts to realize we didn’t make it. Because QS
(still) is the most reliable, the fastest, the most versatile CMS I could ever
have come up with. The galleries, the formbuilder, the newsletter, the intranet,
the forums, the list pages, … these were all very useful features. And they
still are. I recently (few weeks ago) uploaded quite a few improvements to the
QS GitHub repository. Mainly cosmetical changes, and things related to HTML5
(finally). Small improvements for all sorts of forms and the QS formbuilder.

But those updates do not change the fact that QS is dead. But not yet buried.

My aspLite experiment ended up nowhere too, and no one seems to understand where
this could have lead to, or how it could have put classic ASP back on track. But
as MS is focusing more on hosted services (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, GitHub
and more) it’s becoming clear that guys (or small companies) like me have
absolutely no impact on the future of their hosting/developing products. We’re
on our own. So they are. It’s sad. Open source technology has taken over this
past decade.

Take care!

07/08/2020 17:36:24 | Pieter | Login | Replies (4)
 * Bob says: (08/08/2020 11:52:46)
   
   By coincidence I edited a QS site today. I got my "activation" email on
   26/04/2008. So twelve years later QS is still the best CMS I have found or
   used (and I think I have used them all)
   
 * David says: (09/08/2020 13:47:21)
   
   Me too Bob, I still have a few clients on QS and they never give me any
   problems. SEO is getting to be an issue on some of the older ones but that's
   mostly to do with responsiveness and missing SSL
   
   I just updated a test site with the new codebase on GitHub but not seeing any
   obvious changes, maybe it's mostly to do with the inner workings.
   
   Good to hear from you both, keep safe :-)
   
 * Mik says: (15/08/2020 08:06:07)
   
   Also me, I still have more customers using QS. I have always believed that QS
   is the best CMS, which is due to all the points you are making on Pieter. Too
   bad there is no further development on QS. But it's never too late .... :-).
   
 * Pieter says: (15/08/2020 12:00:29)
   
   Thanks guys! Well QS is on GitHub now... Everything has been put in place to
   save it for the future and keep it alive somehow.
   
   The truth is: in these past 6 months, it has had 0 issues, 0 pull requests, 0
   actions, etc... And it barely had visitors and/or downloads.
   
   Lately QS suffered from some issues due to recent Microsoft changes to OLEDB
   drivers (I assume) causing some features in QS to crash (like creating,
   copying, deleting sites). I *think* they have been solved by now.
   
   The thing is, as long as QS is my personal playground, nobody will feel
   comfortable adding things to it... or taking the lead in one way or the
   other. And the ASP code is sooo complicated (and scrambled) that it's nearly
   impossible to start making serious changes... That's how I see it at least...
   
   
   

aspLite update

I’m near to complete a first release of aspLite. There is still some
documentation to write. And that will no doubt result in a few optimizations and
fixes.

What started off as a light-weight ASP/VBScript framework (a bit of an empty box
though), turned into a very exciting ASP Ajax formbuilder, facilitating
feature-rich SPA’s (Single Page Applications).

The new demo is such an SPA, including 24 different forms. Some are expecting
user-input, others are just delivering dynamic content.

These past few days I started to realize that developing such SPA’s is much more
complex than building web applications the more “classic” way, with plenty of
response-redirects to rebuild tables and parts of the GUI. It’s obviously more
complex to build Ajax-driven apps. Hence the need for a framework.

Because things can get complicated very quickly, I made sure to include a
"basic" example that most ASP/VBScript will quickly be able to understand
(including me).

If you did not have the chance to have a closer look at aspLite, make sure to do
so and download the current version from GitHub. Please report any bug or share
any feedback! I'd love to work towards a first release in the coming days.

14/05/2020 12:07:51 | Pieter | Login | Replies (1)
 * Pieter says: (15/05/2020 19:19:58)
   
   It's a WRAP! Today I have released aspLite v0.1.0 -
   https://github.com/aspLite/aspLite. These past 7 weeks were amazing. I have
   learned quite a bit about JavaScript frameworks, their potential, but also
   their limitations. One thing has become very clear to me: there will always
   be some browser-compatibility issues when using any JavaScript library. A bit
   of a browserwar cannot be avoided as it seems. That said though, JavaScript
   frameworks and libraries are there to stay. The rise of JavaScript
   development frameworks (driven by Google, Twitter and Facebook) this past
   decade has made that very clear.
   
   Being able to combine them with a solid server-side technology like ASP, puts
   a web developer in an even stronger position. When it comes to
   database-integrations or file-sharing, solid server-side security is
   indispensable. With aspLite I have found a way to position myself between the
   popular JavaScript frameworks on the one hand, and a solid server side
   framework delivering secure applications on the other.
   
   Because make no mistake: JavaScript frameworks are extremely prone to
   security breaches of all sorts. It's not because ajax calls do not expose
   parameters in the address bar of a browser, that they are secure. They never
   are actually. JavaScript frameworks always need to be implemented with care,
   and with serverside security in mind. And that's not always obvious, to say
   the least.
   
   Anyway, enjoy aspLite!
   

One month

It’s not even a month ago that I baptized my early Covid19 ASP-experiments
aspLite…. This past month has been amazing. Just to name a few things:

 * GitHub gave me back my developer-vibes
    
 * I learned how to use GitHub as a free hosting company (including free SSL)
   for HTML websites (only)
    
 * I struggled my way through VBScript’s rather limited (but useful)
   capabilities to work with binary files – but I managed, and how…
    
 * I developed a brand new jQuery multifile uploader with client-sided
   image-resizing capabilities (never been done before in ASP)
    
 * I discovered DataTables (thanks again Sergio Conselvan) and wrote a rocking
   fast classic ASP integration for it (never been done before in ASP)
    
 * I learned a bunch about jQuery’s Ajax integration and why it’s still the best
   JavaScript toolset out there
    
 * Learned how to use CKEditor 4 & 5 with classic ASP
    
 * Finally understood the buzz about JSON and why it has drastically changed the
   web development business in the past 15 years (and why JavaScript is so
   popular today)
    
 * Dived into Bootstrap (again) and I’m convinced it’s still the way to go for
   new web applications, even after 10 years.
    
 * I fully understand that QS has an outdated GUI, but it’s still the best web
   application I ever developed, and it always will be.
    
 * Classic ASP is dead. But that has its advantages too. No worries about
   compatibility-issues. ASP 3.0 has not been updated ever since 2000.
    
 * aspLite collected 11 stars on GitHub. And I’m VERY happy with that.
    
 * finally, I have been reading CNN’s news feed (just for developing purposes) a
   lot, and I now know they’re not really keen on Donald Trump. Quite on the
   contrary.

Not bad for just 1 month...

28/04/2020 20:48:57 | Pieter | Login | Replies (0)
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