What is “Active Server Pages” (ASP)?
Active Server Pages (ASP) is developed by Microsoft. It is a software package that creates dynamic websites and is used in Web programming. It competes with PHP. To run ASP, it needs a Windows platform with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed, or needs a Linux or Unix platform which has a specially modified version of Apache.
ASP consists of objects accessible by VBScript and Jscript, which are two major web programming languages. It can also be used with other programming languages like PerlScript, the REXX, or Python adding the motor interpretation of language appropriate to IIS.
Active Server Pages (ASP) is a Microsoft-developed SSI successor technology with the server-generated Web pages. Initially, in 1996, only the web server Internet Information Services (IIS) was able to interpret ASP. At present, Microsoft is not developing ASP.
ASP.NET is the new technology that has replaced ASP after the release of ASP. NET Framework in 2002. Since then, ASP is known as the “Classic ASP”.
The ASP syntax has 7 objects that can be manipulated: Objects Request, Response, Server, ObjectContext, Application, and Session Error. The chief objectives of these objects are as follows:
- The Request object can interpret any objects that are returned to it by the client browser, such as Cookies, Forms, etc.
- Request.Form reads the data sent by Post.
- Request.QueryString gets the data.
- The Response object sends information to the client, in form of text in a page or writing cookies to the client browser.
- Object Server helps in creating and managing connections to databases (which is also called ADO) to help open XML files, Word and Excel files, etc.
- ObjectContext monitors all transactions with the help of Microsoft Transaction Server.
- The Application object stores global variables to monitor the site’s visitors
- The Session object also stores variables, but these are accessible only to a single visitor.
- The Error object allows the error handling.
The ASP uses the COM (Component Object Model, also known as ActiveX) system. With this system, it can communicate with the server machine resources and then returns the HTML to the client using the protocol HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).
The ASP can connect to databases. It can also read the XML files and has components for the upload management, FTP, etc. If Microsoft Office is installed on the server, it can also read and write documents from Office (Excel, Word, and other MS Office applications) using the COM system.
The COM technology can also be used by other programming languages such as PHP, and if they are present on a Windows-based web server where the Microsoft Office products are installed.
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