What is ASPA
============
ASPA attempts to automate the process of translating asp pages into php.
The supported languages are JScript and VbScript.

Design of ASPA
==============
ASPA is based on compiler technology.
The source files are transformed into a stream of tokens and lexical analysis
is performed during the process.
A Parser (each language has it's own parser) uses the tokens in order
to generate the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and performs syntax analysis.
The AST is fed to a TreeParser (see http://antlr.org) and the information
stored in the AST along with information stored in xml files are used
to translate the original AST into an other AST which encodes php code.
The xml files are used as templates for the translation of ActiveX components
methods calls into method calls of php of equivalent functionallity.
The user can modify the xml files or add new ones in order to support
additional ActiveX components which are not currently supported.
The final AST is transformed into php source code.

ASPA is under development. Some features are not implemented and more
descriptions of ActiveX components are required.
Currently most of built-in functions of VbScript and the built-in objects
of JScript are supported. Also, the Request, Response, Sever and Session 
objects are partially suported since some of the included methods in these
objects are missing.
We anticipate that the missing features will be implemented soon with the help
provided by the Free Software community.

Dependencies
============
In order to use ASPA you should have a Java Virtual Machine.
If you want to build the project, you'll also need ant (http://ant.apache.org).

Libraries needed in runtime:
antlr (http://www.antlr.org)
log4j for logging(http://logging.apache.org/log4j)
dom4j for xml parsing(http://dom4j.sourceforge.net)
commons-collections (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/collections)
Libraries needed at compile time:
Those referenced above together with annotation2 (in the file sharing section of antlr.org)
The libraries are included in the lib directory.

Building from sources
=====================
From the aspParser directory type "ant compile".
The default compiler is jikes. If jikes is not available delete
the line:
build.compiler=jikes
from the build.properties file.

Run the program
===============
There are 2 shell scripts available to run ASPA.

The first one is called run.sh and is intended for the development
process. To invoke the program type ./run.sh file baseDir options.
The file is the path of the asp page to be translated.
The baseDir is used to resolve the full path of pages included from
the asp page which is translated with the virtual method of include command.
For example if baseDir is /home/anakreon/asps and the page  contains the statement:
<!--#include virtual="/file2.asp" --> then the full path of the file2.asp will
be /home/anakreon/asps/file2.asp. A similar process is used in Windows.
The options are:
-t : prints the tokens and exits (usefull when the Lexer failed to parse the file)
-v : displays the AST of the file and the AST of the translated version in a JFrame.
-x : produces a test case for the file in xml format.
-s : generates source code in php.
If none of the options is provided then the source is parsed and errors are reported
but no output is produced.

The other script, called parse.sh, is intended for the user of ASPA.
You should modify the BASE_DIR variable in the script which
should contain the full path of the aspParser directory.
To invoke the program type ./parse.sh args where arguments are:
-o : The output directory where the php pages will be stored
-b : The base directory of the server. Used to resolve includes with the
virtual command.
-s : The directory which contains the asp pages to be translated.
If the -s argument is not provided, then the directory provided with
the -b argument is used instead.
-ng : No sources will be generated. The translation is performed and errors
are reported.  
-js : if an asp page has not defined the language asume is js (default is vb)
The program will translate the asp pages in that directory.