Introduction
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.” 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. ASP technology is supported
on all Microsoft Web servers that are freely available. If you have Window NT
4.0 Server installed you can download IIS (Internet Information Server) 3.0 or
4.0. If you are using Window 2000, IIS 5.0 comes with it as a free component. If
you have Window 95/98 you can download Personal Web Server (PWS) which is a
smaller version of IIS from Window 95/98 CD. You can also download these
products for free from Microsoft's web site.
Process of ASP :
- The browser finds the appropriate web
server (like IIS or PWS) and asks for the required page.
- The web server locates the required page,
and parses out the ASP code within the ASP script delimiters (<%…%>)
produces a standard HTML page. The server sends that HTML page back to the
browser, so the user cannot see ASP code.
- The browser executes the client side
scripting (like JavaScripts) determining how to display the results.
Advantage of ASP
ASP is a server side script and it can perform many backend
processing jobs for a web site, same way it can't do many things particularly
the client end operations as it has no control over the client end events or
user controls. So there are many advantages and disadvantages of using ASP to
manage web pages. We may not like to say disadvantages of ASP and it is better
to say the limitation of any server side scripting language, as these
limitations are faced by other scripting languages like PHP, JSP, Perl etc.
