Active Server Pages (ASP)

• ASP or Active(X) Server Pages are a CGI-like technology developed by Microsoft.  It allows you to create dynamically generated web pages from the server side using VBScript or JavaScript.
• ASP is not a language (ex.VBScript or JavaScript) - it is a hosting environment that extends the normal capabilities of a web server and exposes objects for use in web programming. It is accessed by either VBScript or JavaScript, and in fact many of the functions you use client-side with these languages can be copied into an ASP page.
• ASP's coding, regardless of the language you choose, is all ascii text and is used right along side normal HTML and is delimited by <% and %>.
• It has certain built-in objects that can be used to store and retrieve variables, get information from user submitted forms, get information about the server itself and, of course, write HTML based on this information.
• Microsoft's Internet Information Server and the latest Peer Web Server support ASP.  However a company called Chilisoft has a product called Chilisoft ASP which provides support to a wide variety of web servers, including Apache, Lotus, Netscape, O'Reilly, Sun Solaris and IBM AIX.
• ADOs or ActiveX Data Objects are a application programming interface (API) and part of Microsoft's Data Access Components. It provides a number of objects that are used in the manipulation of databases through ASP.
• ADO objects are used by first creating an instance of the object you want on the server. This is done with simple ASP code. Then, you simply use the methods and properties of the objects to accomplish what you want.

          Date and time / code      Loading status display / code     Remote ip / code

         Script run time / code      Server to client / code      User case / code     Simple Program  / code        

         Color / code      Break in text / code     Parse / code

• ASP can be used to create dynamic web pages that don't require a lot of client-side programming.
• The most common use of ASP is database connection. Any database that uses ODBC can be accessed by ASP including Microsoft Access 97/2000, Microsoft's SQL server and Oracle.

Jscript ASP

Questions or Comments?

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Or my partner kellogg@cs.nmhu.edu (Graduate Student)