15-06-2012, 10:42 AM
Introduction to ASP
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Introduction
Are you sick of static HTML pages? Do you want to create dynamic web pages? Do you
want to enable your web pages with database access? If your answer is “Yes”, ASP might
be a solution for you. In May 2000, Microsoft estimated that there are over 800,000ASP
developers in the world (1). You may come up with a question what the heck ASP is.
Don’t worry.
What is ASP?
ASP stands for Active Server Pages. Microsoft introduced Active Server Pages in
December 1996, beginning with Version 3.0. Microsoft officially defines ASP as:
“Active Server Pages is an open, compile-free application environment in which you can
combine HTML, scripts, and reusable ActiveX server components to create dynamic and
powerful Web-based business solutions. Active Server pages enables server side scripting
for IIS with native support for both VBScript and Jscript.” (2). In other words, ASP is a
Microsoft technology that enables you to create dynamic web sites with the help of server
side script, such as VBScript and Jscript.
What is an ASP file?
An ASP file is quite like an HTML file. It contains text, HTML tags and scripts,
which are executed on the server. The two widely used scripting languages for an ASP
page are VBScript and JScript. VBScript is pretty much like Visual Basic, whereas
Jscript is the Microsoft’s version of JavaScript. However, VBScript is the default
scripting language for ASP (3). Besides these two scripting languages, you can use other
scripting language with ASP as long as you have an ActiveX scripting engine for the
language installed, such as PerlScript.
How does it work?
As you have learned, scripts in an ASP file are server-side scripts, which means that the
scripts are processed on the server and then the result of the scripts will be converted to
HTML before sending to the web browser. To illustrate, let’s take a look at this table to
compare the process of retrieving an HTML page and an ASP page (5).
How to make it work?
First of all, you need to set up an environment where you can execute your
scripts; that is you need to set up your web server (IIS or PWS). If you have an NT
Server, IIS is already installed for you. If you Window 95/98, you can install PWS from
the add-ons directory on the Win 98 CD.
What are its advantages?
While learning about ASP technology in previous sections, you might ask
yourself all the time what it can do for you. Certainly, ASP must have some strength;
otherwise, it won’t be popular as such. Let’s count on its strong points and functionality.
1. Dynamic web page – Since ASP supports scripting languages, which run on the
web server, your web page can be dynamically created. For example, you can
create your web page so as to greeting each user when they log into your page
differently.
2. Browser independent – ASP is browser independent because all the scripting code
runs on the server. The browser only gets the results from the server in a standard
HTML page.
3. Database Access – One of the greatest assets of ASP is database connectivity.
ASP enables you to easily build rich database functionality into your web site,
such as form processing.