As frontend developers, we always want to use the latest and the greatest. A lot of the time however, the clients we work for, are dependent on old...
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Just shows that we don't need the latest and greatest for everything. New site looks nice, is fast to load, gets to the point and follows a lot of best practices.
Recycling the old bits that still work is 10 times faster than rewriting everything and perhaps this could serve as a warning to the "new and shiny" brigade that you don't need to upgrade everything if it is still fit for purpose.
I agree, and I think we often re-invent the wheel in frontend.
The new and shiny is great for developers and the developer-experience, but for end users there's no noticable difference.
A “Product Card” is a “Product Card” for the end user, no matter if it was done in Classic ASP or React ;-)
One of the best posts I read over dev.to. I was born in 1998, you have more experience than for how long I've been alive. The initial website you created is absolutely beautiful and reminds me of Windows 98.
Also, I love one of your reply, "A “Product Card” is a “Product Card” for the end user." Strive for simplicity, use the bare minimum, make things simple rather than complex. Glad to see an actual senior developer sharing wisdom with us. Thank you!
Thank you so much! I'm amazed you know Windows 98, when you were born that year! Until recently, I kept my original Windows 3.1 floppy disks and Windows 95+98 CD-ROM's ...
I suspect Muhammad knows Win98 from an engineering-archaeology class... :) Floppy Disks are the stone cuneiform tablets of the Internet.
I have a 23 year old site I need to do some maintenance on or maybe migrate to Wordpress, just for the sake of posterity. It's Classic ASP plus "Windows Script Components" and a little ASP.Net in one or two places. Truly horrorshow. The idjit who wrote the code -- namely, me -- clearly didn't know what he was doing.
I also thought "who the hell coded this s***" when I looked at my old code!
I found a comment in my code that read "This function is unmaintainable garbage" :) which is to say that even when I wrote it, I knew I shouldn't. Believe me, no one else EVER touched this code, so that had to be me.
😂
In early 2000s computers in my country were very rare and where I lived, there were extremely rare. My dad got us Pentium 3, it was darn expensive. Windows 98 was the first Windows I used.
It was only a few years later we installed Windows XP. Also remember playing Age Of Empires one and two. Good old days. I never used a floppy disk myself but saw my brother used it once. CDs were the norm though.
Cool! Performance was SO important back then - 2-4 MB websites, as is the norm today, would take minutes to load.
I've clicked the unicorn badge many times. I have never read an article I've felt is more deserving. Kudos!
Wow, thank you very much!
KISSat finest :)Thank you the insider info of updating a monolithic dinosaur :) How was the original data connection arranged? like spaghetti code, everything everywhere or was some minimal model files? How long was the original code? Just a few file and few hundred lines?
It was structured, but not how you'd structure it with a bit more experience! The main "default.asp" was a huge
Select Case(same asswitchin JS), that took apageTypefrom theurl, and returned the function matching that!Exactly, if the code compiles, runs, and does it's job, it's good code no matter how old it is.
Good read
Thanks!
Gotta say the new website looks sleak and performs well.
Really hits the point that codes are, at the end, a tool that properly used can always gives you great result.
Problem is, properly using it really takes experience 😅
Thank you! And I agree, if you really know HTML, CSS and JS, you can do anything 😁
That's a great display of problem solving skills, instead of trying to force the use of the latest trends because it's the answer to every possible problem. Nice!
I'm curious: do you think the dated website was really the cause of their difficulties? Do they know why they could survive and thrive again?
Thank you! Fantask has a store in Copenhagen (actually, it's the worlds oldest existing comicbook store, founded in 1971) - and like other bookstores, they saw a large proportion of their sales switch to online. And then, becuase their online store was dated and malfunctioning, they lost a huge potential ... and saw a decline in revenue, both online and in-store. Since the new website was launched, they've increased their online sales significantly, but having a bookstore nowadays is not a lucrative business.
The site looks great!
You should consider using IIS URL Rewrite to remove the
.aspfrom the URLs. It's pretty straightforward to configure. :)Surprisingly, it's actually still occasionally getting some very small bug fixes. It's still officially supported by Microsoft until 2025, including any major bug fixes.
It's amazing they still maintain these old technologies!
Thanks for the excellent post and inspiration. Note that you are wrong about one thing - this is possible in the real world!
I used to work as a freelancer without BE developers and project managers, so making smart decisions not to throw everything away but to keep the core and vamp it up is definitely possible in such a constellation.
Such an excellent example could also set a precedence for big companies where there are many stakeholders to reconsider how to go about doing such a project in the real world, so kudos for that.
Thanks! I think it's only possible for smaller clients - there are too many stakeholders on larger projects (and companies!)
As a 65-year-old developer who started building sites back in 1992, I concur and often long for the days when things were simpler. Then I go back to writing web apis that use an ORM framework and feed angular components from an MVC controller....and that feeling goes away. :)
I mostly work with Vue nowadays. But I also do a lot of "vanilla projects" without build-tools, as it's way faster for me.
Every once in awhile I'll have to revisit a page I wrote in the early 00s that's either PHP or Classic ASP. All of the code is so nested and awful. All the mistakes you make as a junior dev.
Working with Classic ASP was painful if you needed to manipulate strings. I had to go that direction because the server at the office was NT. The site rarely went down but I pushed it pretty hard.
Yeah, revisiting old code can be painful! And I had completely forgotten a lot of the syntax, like
ReDim Preserve😆I can completely relate to this post. I'm not a full time developer but I learned the basics of web development back in 2010. It was straight to the point: HTML, Js and Css for front-end. C# or PHP back-end and a good LAMP setup. Since then many frameworks have been added and sometimes I just wonder if many of them are really necessary or add value. I don't have the answer but I believe simplicity is better as long as the main goal is reached without compromising efficiency and reliability.
I agree, simplicity is always the right path!
Enjoyed this story a lot. The reality is old tech works fine in many cases, and it may not be worth it for a small business to replace things like you discussed. Using modern HTML and CSS with a sprinkle of JS will take you a long way. I think there is a fixation on large scale businesses these days, and we forget about smaller businesses with simpler needs and less resources.
I did my final year college project in ASP, even though ASP.NET was around, because I got a well-written book on it in a sale bin and I was a poor student! I wish I had the code to look over it now. Glad to head Fantask is still going. As a comic-book lover, I will look to visit if I make it to Copenhagen. Thanks for sharing 😀
Thanks! I agree, small businesses cannot afford the multitude of services required to run a modern webshop, if it's more than a few hundred products. And please do visit Fantask! It's been on the same corner in Copenhagen for almost 50 years, and has been visited by many famous artists through the years: Stan Lee, Carl Barks, Will Eisner etc.!
Enjoyed reading your article sent me down memory lane 🙂
Recently I was asked by a friend to build him a 'newsletter subscription page with admin' - being a donet dev by trade it got me thinking how do I come up with a solution on a Linux hosted environment and here php was simply awesome so light I had implemented auth, session handling and displaying data from a MySQL dB.
Important point here is the fun factor I was smiling and enjoying the work I had to learn php but didn't take long its so well supported and mature now and it really does fit its niche perfectly so this has completely changed my approach to freelance work (for the better).
PHP is in some ways the succesor to Classic ASP - if you could upload a static database-file, like an Access .mdb, it would be very similar.
It is morning here in India right now. This is the first article for today and for a few days that I have read cover to cover. And my day has found a new bloom. I cannot thank you enough for the pains you have taken to put this up for us and Fantask for that matter! It felt like a fairytale of eternity in the world of computers which smelled of just-unwrapped Boomer chewing gums. Please write more, of this or any other genre, as you please. Just please don't stop writing. And today I have a got a new friend sharing my birthyear i.e., Fantask.
Thank you, very glad you liked it!
@madsstoumann great article reminded me with the old good days of computer programming and internet.
And If I were fantask I will give you a profit share after passing the bankruptcy, you really deserve it.
I get free comics now and then!
I have to give in to you! I actually expected the website to fail when I tried to open it on my mobile, but the website has not disappointed me. It's simple, clean and very FAST! Kudos!
Thank you! I had to brush up on my knowledge about ancient database connections (ADODB with Classic ASP), but was also surprised that it's pretty fast!
Thank you! They use the Windows VBA app, I wrote back in 1993-94 for all data-entries: products, customers, webpage-content etc. A subset of these data are then exported and synced with the web db.
Very inspiring article Mads! I also like the original 1995 design :)
Thanks! Maybe that retro-look will come back!?😂
Such a good decision to help them and very kind of you. Helping each other in such times is really important.
Also you had a lot of fun obviously, 7 days instead of few months, godly pleasure ^_^
Thank you! A bit pressed for time, but fun!
Judo!!! This is a great display of refactoring 😎
Thx!
Fantastic. It makes me think again before going deeper into other "latest" frameworks. Thanks!
Glad you liked it!
0.25 border solved everything. GJ
Flot stykke arbejde.
Mange tak!
The new site looks great! It's super speedy and responsive to boot! Fantastic work.
Thank you!
Nice job, maybe consider URL Rewriting to make it a bit more prettier
Yes, I need to look into that. Not sure if it even existed back in the 1990’s! 😂
This is fantastic! Well done and thank you for sharing this very inspiring story!
Thank you!
I can't believe you only did it in 7 days. Incredible work!
Thank you! I was a bit pressed for time!
Nice works! It’s great tbecause I think that your knowledge increased a lot.
Thanks!
Best article I ever read on here! Thank you for sharing this! :)
Thank you!
1993 born here! Your first version is not hurting eyes, actually it’s sparkling 🤩
Love your post!
Thank you!
That's some lightning fast site, it was as if it was waiting for me to click on the link. Good job Senior
Thank you!
Read it great interest as front dev and comics geek, to find out in the end that the author is also a (kind of) work colleague! Great post, great work!
Thank you! And yes, I'm a comic geek too ;-)
And a valtechie too!
😀👍
Nice Write. Thanks for sharing. I'm willing to know that if it is possible to migrate a classic ASP site to .NET Core?
Thank you! No, it’s not possible to migrate directly.
Wow such a great story! I admire your helpfulness.
Thank you!
Great work sir. This inspires me a lot as a developer. Thanks sir.
Thank you!
Great work, it shows that we dont need to always reinvent and use the latest web developement tools to get things done. The design is simple, nice and still appealing to the visual aspects.
Thank you very much!
Good job man. The new site is super fast and functional🔥
Thank you!
Good job!
Thanks!