Tim,
"Evertjan" briefly mention an idea that I use with great success.
Let me describe what I did, and you might find some aspects of
this will work well for you.
I have web pages where customers enter data that need to
be processed by another program – and this other program
does not play well with IIS (because the IIS "user" accounts
do not have user profiles, and for many other reasons). So,
this other process runs all the time in the background, and it
monitors the database where the web page puts the customers
data.
I can run this "background" program either in the foreground
(in other words, log-in to the server and run it) or in the
background (actually) by making it into an NT Service (which
is super easy, by the way). An NT Service keeps running even
if you log-out. Also, it can be set to auto-restart in the event
it terminates abnormally.
You _could_ run it on demand by launching the program from
your web page. I assume you would use the Windows
Scripting Host object to do this. But keep in mind what might
happen if multiuple users ran this at the same time: you will
have multiple instances of the "background" process running
as a result. In that case, you need to assure your system
does not run out of resources, and that the application will
run okay in multiple instances.
In my case, this is just another reason why the web page
cannot be talking directly to the background process. Instead,
I have the background process doing a query every 500ms
to see if there are any data to process. I have a table where
new "work" is posted, and one column in that table is a status
indicator. When the status column reads a certain value, the
background process takes care of it. I believe this is the kind
of thing "Evertjan" may have been suggesting.
Good luck,
Jim Rodgers
tim wrote on 16 jul 2007 in microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general:
I want to execute a VB application from a ASP page (not .Net). Want I
want to do is
that I write some parameters to a database and then start the external
application that will pickup these parameters and run in the
background.
"Evertjan." wrote:
>
Set a variable, say in the database with the ASP,
and poll it with your external script or program.