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ASP

In the past, web developers wishing to create more than just static displays of information for the web had to turn to CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and Perl to introduce some sort of interaction to their pages. While this approach worked and indeed many sites still use it today, CGI was not by any means fast and the quest for an alternative means to create a page dynamically continued. Then finally came web scripting languages and with them Microsoft's Active Server Pages: a server-side scripting technology for building web pages that are both dynamic and interactive.

An active server page itself is simply a text file script with the extension .asp containing HTML, client-side, and server-side script. The implementation behind it meanwhile was created by Microsoft and intended as an open technology server-side framework, giving web developers the freedom to develop dynamic web sites using information accessed from the many COM-compliant data sources available to them.

The syntax and grammar of ASP is easy to comprehend, and yet powerful enough to:

• support some interaction between page user and server
• allow web page access to databases and directory services
• incorporate and make use of high-powered COM components

It's also server-based and so browser independent as well, leaving you only the problems of which cross-browser client-side script and stylesheet you want to use.

The static content of the page is created using HTML and text. We can also use standard HTML forms to question the client and, using ASP, create a page that incorporates their answers into the text. This is the simplest form of client-server interactivity using ASP.

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