Using HTTP/Json endpoints in ASP Classic
I've recently had to write some ASP Classic. Don't worry, it's not like I'm writing new features, just integrating with old ones. So, since this is an ancient technology, some of this may be old news to you. But much of it was new to me, and I'm a developer with some years of ASP Classic experience.
Most of the stuff I had to do was pretty minor, but one major thing I found interesting was that I had a need to make an HTTP request in ASP classic. This turns out to be not so bad.
The trickiest part was figuring out that I had to explicitly specify the content type, since it apparently doesn't set a default.
So, yay! But also, uh oh. Now I have a response, but it's in Json. How the heck do I deal with that in ASP Classic? I was already worried about having to create an XML endpoint or finding some hacky JSON parser written in VBScript. But I took a deep breath and Googled it first. I was pleasantly shocked with what Stack Overflow told me about parsing Json in ASP. Did you know that ASP Classic is typically associated with VBScript, but actually can support other languages, like JScript and PerlScript? JScript is Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript (commonly referred to as JavaScript), which they made available server-side via ASP long before you had a crush on Node.js. (Yeah I'm trolling a bit, but give me a break: as I write this, I've been layed up with the flu watching a House, M.D. marathon on Netflix, so I'm feeling a bit snarky).
ANYWAY
If we can run JScript and VBScript with the same ASP Classic page, then guess what, we can use Douglas Crockford's JSON library. It's so perfect and simple, and I wish I came up with it on my own.
That's about 100 times more elegant of a solution than I even expected when I started on this code.
