Features and Enhancements in ASP 4.0.2

Sun Java System Active Server Pages (also referred to as Sun Java System ASP) is a platform-independent implementation of ASP technology. Sun Java System ASP 4.0.3 includes the following enhancements:

• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Solaris™ 9 x86, Solaris™ 10 SPARC and x86, Windows 2003, HP-UX 11i, and AIX 5.1 and 5.2.

• Updated DataDirect ODBC drivers . For more information about the updated driver suite, go to:http://www.datadirect.com/products/odbc/odbcrelhighlights/index.ssp

• Support for MySQL database versions 4.0 and 4.1.

• Streamlined installation. Serial numbers have been removed, and you no longer need to enter a license key during installation.

• Support for access logging and the logging of HTTP errors. Enable or disable these from the Server Settings page of the Administration Console. You can also look in the casp.cnfg configuration file for lines that set asplogdir, asplogerrors, and asplogaccess:

  • asplogdir sets the directory to which ASP should write log files for HTTP errors and/or ASP page accesses.

  • asplogerrors and asplogacess work as binary flags to turn either or both of the log files on and off. The appropriate values are 0 and 1 and default to 0 at installation.

• Support for custom error pages for the 400-range with both Apache and Sun Java™ System Web Server. If a custom error page is defined in the Web server configuration files, ASP redirects to that page for the corresponding errors (most commonly, 404 file not found).

• Enhanced HTTP charset functionality. The HTTP charset attribute can now be set on an ASP-wide basis in the casp.cnfg file (or the registry on Windows). Previously, this had to be set on a page-by-page basis. The charset setting is under the [default machine] section in casp.cnfg. Examples of valid values include ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. By default, ASP does not set charset on "text/html" pages. In that case, the browser picks up the Web server’s value.

• Enhanced VBScript functionality. The following VBScript byte-related functions are now supported: LenB, InStrB, LeftB, RightB, MidB, ChrB, AscB. These functions behave largely as expected. However, there is one caveat you should be aware of regarding the byte-order and wide-character size of the operating system under which ASP runs in some situations. Following is an example scenario in which character width discrepancies would be experienced:

  inchar = "A"

  leftbyte = LeftB(inchar)rightbyte = RightB(inchar)

  outchar = leftbyte & rightbyte

  On Windows, outchar will contain "A" as expected. However, on Solaris or Linux, the character A in string "A" is represented by four bytes. So the above code would yield only half of a valid character. Namely, the first and last bytes of "A" without the two middle bytes. A browser will display garbage or its unknown character symbol if the broken character is passed to Response.Write.

  You can determine the byte-length of a character by calling the VBScript LenB function as follows:

  Response.Write LenB("A")

  On Windows, two will be returned. On Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC, and Linux, four will be returned.