How to get ASP support on Linux

Back when I was in 5th semester, we had this subject called E-Commerce, it also had a lab attached to it which required us to code in ASP. Now I for one am staunch supporter and user of Linux and Open source applications, so I did not have windows required to run ASP. I looked high and low Google on how to get ASP working on Linux and just when I was about to give up hope, I found it: Arrowhead

Arrowhead is a Java servelet that will run on any Java servelet server to parse your ASP/VBScript code on Linux for you. So lets get started shall we?

Step 1: Following the requisites listed on this page, we’d need the following software installed on your linux system…

JDK 1.4.2 – Tested with 1.4.2. Available Here.
Java Servlet Server – Tested with Jakarta Tomcat version 5.0.27. Available Here.
Log4j – Tested with 1.2.8. Available Here.
JRegEx – Tested with 1.2_01. Available Here.

Step 2: Then you will need to download Arrowhead, from here (It’s a jar file).

Step 3: You must now have root access because it is required that you copy all of the above downloaded .jar files to /usr/share/tomcat (considering you have Tomcat Java servelet server installed).

Fire up the terminal and navigate to /usr/share/tomcat
$ cd /usr/share/tomcat

Create a directory called webapps
$ sudo mkdir webapps

Change to webapps directory
$ cd webapps/

Create a directory called aspfiles and then enter that directory
$ sudo mkdir aspfiles
$ cd aspfiles/

Create a directory called WEB-INF (yes, it must be in capitals)
$ sudo mkdir WEB-INF/
$ cd WEB-INF/

Create a directory called lib
$ sudo mkdir lib
$ cd lib

Now, copy all the files arrowhead-0.x.x.jar, log4j-1.2.8.jar, jregex1.2.01.jar to this directory (ie., /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/aspfiles/lib/)

Assuming all the jar files are on your /home/<username>

$ sudo cp ~/*.jar /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/aspfiles/lib/

Then you can check whether all files have been successfully copied by issuing the following command…

$ ls /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/aspfiles/lib/

Step 4: Download the sample xml file from here, it’s going to be saved as a .txt file which of course you must rename to a .xml file (ie., web.xml)

Now copy the web.xml file into your WEB-INF directory

$ sudo cp ~/web.xml /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/aspfiles/WEB-INF/

Step 5: Create a test file called say hello.asp with the following code in it…

<% response.write “Hello World” %>

and then copy the hello.asp to /opt/tomcat/webapps/aspfiles/ by issuing the command

$ sudo ~/hello.asp /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/aspfiles/

Step 6: If you are running Tomcat server, the port for access to it will be 8080 so all you have to do now is open up your browser and type

http://localhost:8080/hello.asp

and that’s all there is to it, It should render the text Hello World

However should you run into problems, please leave back a comment on this blog post and hopefully I should be able to help you out!