Active Server Pages (ASP)

As the Internet has matured into a viable marketplace, Web site design has to change accordingly. There came a number of exciting technologies for creating powerful, highly interactive, data-driven Web sites. CGI happened to be the first solid technology, but it turned out to be inefficient, slow and not that much elegant. Microsoft's solution for accomplishing the creation of dynamic pages in a simple way is through the use of Active Server Pages (ASP). ASP contains two parts: programmatic code and embedded HTML. The programmatic code can be written using a number of scripting languages, such as VBScript, JScript, Python, and PHP. When a Web browser requests an ASP file, the asp.dll file in the Web server does some initial processing on the requested file. Consequently the scripting engine on the server executes the instructions embedded in the script file and finally ASP translates the results of the execution into HTML to be sent to the client. For ASP files to be processed! On the server side as told above, the Web server has to be ASP-enabled.

ASP files are text files and simple to design. ASPs are powered to collect information from users using HTML forms and can process the information using form-processing script. ASP supports object-oriented techniques and it has seven built-in objects. Each object has several methods to accomplish a variety of tasks. The ASP objects "Request" and "Response" are being used to read and write cookies on clients' computers, but cookies are time bound. The ASP object "Session" helps to maintain state for each visitor to Web sites for the duration of his or her visit. The ASP "Application" object provides a mechanism to persist non-user-specific information for greater lengths of time. Thus ASP has been blessed with a number of various mechanisms for maintaining state.

Towards reusability, ASP has come out with a few vital components, such as, Ad Rotator, Content Linker, and Browser Capabilities. ASP supports Server-side Includes to simplify maintenance. With the file system object, ASP provides a way to access properties of files and folders, read data in from them, create new ones, and write over the old ones and more. The primary use of ASP technology is to read and modify databases. Being able to interact with databases is the most useful feature of ASP. ASP uses ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) Component, which contains Connection and Recordset objects among others, for communicating with databases. ADO works with any OLEDB, which includes ODBC-compliant databases. ASP also helps to make changes in the database. This includes adding new records to a table, changing data in an existing record and deleting records from a table.

SQL statements can be embedded in ASP files to enhance information retrieval such as to selectively choose only a certain subset of a table thereby users can restrict the data returned by the database to only the information he is interested in. ASP also supports many advanced database techniques by both SQL and ADO. The features above mentioned really makes ASP a vibrant and exciting technology for designing Web sites, which can generate dynamic pages. Also it's leaning towards databases makes it an interesting tool for creation of e-commerce Web sites. Currently many of the popular e-commerce sites, such as www.dell.com, www.buy.com and www.bn.com, are being operated on the strengths and robustness of ASP technology from Microsoft. ASP is easy to learn and use and it is poised for a dominant role in the world of Internet commerce.