ASP
What Are Active Server Pages?
Active Server Pages (ASPs) are Web pages that contain server-side scripts in addition to the
usual mixture of text and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tags. Server-side scripts are special
commands you put in Web pages that are processed before the pages are sent from your Personal
Web Server to the Web browser of someone who's visiting your Web site. . When you type a URL in
the Address box or click a link on a Web page, you're asking a Web server on a computer somewhere to send a file to the Web browser (sometimes called a "client") on your computer. If that file is a normal HTML file, it looks exactly the same when your Web browser receives it as it did before the Web server sent it. After receiving the file, your Web browser displays its contents as a combination of text, images, and sounds.
In the case of an Active Server Page, the process is similar, except there's an extra processing
step that takes place just before the Web server sends the file. Before the Web server sends the
Active Server Page to the Web browser, it runs all server-side scripts contained in the page.
Some of these scripts display the current date, time, and other information. Others process
information the user has just typed into a form, such as a page in the Web site's guestbook.
To distinguish them from normal HTML pages, Active Server Pages are given the ".asp" extension.
What Can You Do with Active Server Pages?
There are many things you can do with Active Server Pages.
You can display date, time, and other information in different ways.
You can make a survey form and ask people who visit your site to fill it out, send emails,
save the information to a file, etc.
What Do Active Server Pages Look Like?
The appearance of an Active Server Page depends on who or what is viewing it. To the Web browser
that receives it, an Active Server Page looks just like a normal HTML page. If a visitor to your
Web site views the source code of an Active Server Page, that's what they see: a normal HTML
page. However, the file located in the server looks very different. In addition to text and
HTML tags, you also see server-side scripts. This is what the Active Server Page looks like to
the Web server before it is processed and sent in response to a request.
What Do Server-Side Scripts Look Like?
Server-side scripts look a lot like HTML tags. However, instead of starting and ending with
lesser-than ( < ) and greater-than ( > ) brackets, they typically start with <% and end
with %>. The <% is called an opening tag, and the %> is called a closing tag. In between
these tags are the server-side scripts. You can insert server-side scripts anywhere in your Web
page--even inside HTML tags.
Click here for sample ASP scripts!
Do You Have to Be a Programmer to Understand Server-Side Scripting?
There's a lot you can do with server-side scripts without learning how to program. For this
reason, much of the online Help for Active Server Pages is written for people who are familiar
with HTML but aren't computer programmers.
What is ASP?
- ASP stands for Active Server Pages
- ASP is a program that runs inside IIS
- IIS stands for Internet Information Services
- IIS comes as a free component with Windows 2000
- IIS is also a part of the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack
- The Option Pack can be downloaded from Microsoft
- PWS is a smaller - but fully functional - version of IIS
- PWS can be found on your Windows 95/98 CD
ASP Compatibility
- ASP is a Microsoft Technology
- To run IIS you must have Windows NT 4.0 or later
- To run PWS you must have Windows 95 or later
- ChiliASP is a technology that runs ASP without Windows OS
- InstantASP is another technology that runs ASP without Windows
- What is an ASP File?
- An ASP file is just the same as an HTML file
- An ASP file can contain text, HTML, XML, and scripts
- Scripts in an ASP file are executed on the server
- An ASP file has the file extension ".asp"
- How Does ASP Differ from HTML?
- When a browser requests an HTML file, the server returns the file
- When a browser requests an ASP file, IIS passes the request to the ASP engine. The ASP engine reads the ASP file, line by line, and executes the scripts in the file. Finally, the ASP file is returned to the browser as plain HTML
What can ASP do for you?
- Dynamically edit, change or add any content of a Web page
- Respond to user queries or data submitted from HTML forms
- Access any data or databases and return the results to a browser
- Customize a Web page to make it more useful for individual users
- The advantages of using ASP instead of CGI and Perl, are those of simplicity and speed
- Provides security since your ASP code can not be viewed from the browser
- Since ASP files are returned as plain HTML, they can be viewed in any browser
- Clever ASP programming can minimize the network traffic