Active Server Pages
Active Server Pages are the dominant server side technology.
Tons of web apps are written using the stuff, and unlike the next generation ASP.NET plain old ASP pages do not run on Linux. At all. We need to fix that, as it's unlikely the world will wish to rewrite a million and one web stores in PHP (which isn't really compellingly better, in my humble opinion, apart from being portable).
ASP pages are server side VisualBasic. They can do everything VisualBasic programs can normally do, including instantiating COM objects written in C++ (which is a common technique). So any implementation needs to be based on Wine to have a hope of actually working.
Implementing an ASP interpreter means:
Implement Windows Scripting (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnanchor/html/scriptinga.asp http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1200/active/)
Writing a VisualBasic grammar (implement vbscript.dll, prototype here: http://vb2py.sourceforge.net/vbgrammar.txt)
- Writing an interpreter that can run VB scripts embedded in web pages and turn the output into HTML.
It should be based on the OleAutomation APIs (because that gives VB compatible type semantics, most of this is already done)
- It should support the COM stuff (a lot of this is already implemented)
Linking it to Apache (http://www.apache-asp.org/).
In other words it's mostly a case of linking together code that's already done with a completed VB grammar (which will need to be reverse engineered).