Active Server Pages

Active Server Pages or ASP for short. So what are they?

ASP is just a .dll file that sits on a web server. ASP takes the work behind displaying a web page on a screen away from the browser and on to the server. The server automatically reads the code in the .asp page and then sends the results of any tasks it performs to the browser, usually as HTML. This means the browser doesn't have to deal with different types or versions of scripting languages like JavaScript. All it sees is HTML that it can quickly understand and display. The advantage is that the developer can add some very clever programming to a site, but because the results are just HTML, all browsers everywhere can read it.

ASP can do things such as reading from and writing to databases, taking input from the user and return information based upon it, or passing variables from one page to another.

You can't look at asp pages like you can HTML, just by clicking on them and opening them in the browser. The pages have to physically sit on a server. And if you do look at the source, it's only the HTML you can see because only HTML is sent to the browser. This finally means that web developers can write code others can't see and therefore can't steal.

ASP runs on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) or Personal Web Server (PWS). The language used to perform ASP tasks is VBScript. Anyone who understands HTML can write ASP. In fact, most of an ASP page is actually HTML anyway, with the ASP scripts contained within the <%  %> delimiters. ASP is certainly not as difficult as JavaScript.

If you want to find out more about ASP, have a look at www.aspsite.com.