What is ASP?

ASP--Active Sever Pages, ASP is a technology for building dynamic and interactive web pages using server-side scripting. It embeds VBscript or JScript within HTML and thus brings dynamic content to ASP web pages.

ASP file component

An ASP page contains 3 distinct types of information:

• Text: Plain text that is imply displayed by the browser.
• HTML: Hypertext Mark Ups which are interpreted by the browser.
• Script: Scripts(VBScript/JScript) which are interpreted by IIS.

Advantages- HTML is basically a static display language. It produces a displayable web page with static text. That particular page will never change. ASP on the other hand can create new pages based on user actions, customizable to that particular user or particular time period.

Disadvantages: ASP is not support on all servers. Although ASP extensions are provided for non-NT servers such as the Apache WEb server running on Unix platforms, the results are not as good as on NT server using IIS web servers.

ASP Basic Server Process Flow

A web server is simply a computer that provides web services on the internet, or local intranet. The simplest server locates the web page requested by the clients browsers and sends it back to the browser using HTTP(Hyper text Transport Protocol).

When a browser loads a .asp file, it does the following steps:

• Browser requests web page from the Web server Server locates the web page on the server
• Server interprets ASP script and creates modified page
• Server sends modified page the client
• Client browser interprets page and may request other pages, or images from server

Compare ASP and HTML

Pure HTML file is static and doesn't provide any interactive or dynamic content. Through the power of VBscript/JScript, ASP brings dynamic extensions to traditional HTML file.

• Asp can update a database. Plain HTML can't .
• Customized web pages to a particular user, saved in DB
• Display/update database use web pages
• Create pages with intelligent animations, based on user responses.
• Communicate with the user, respond to requests, interact.
• Support Active X controls.

Active Server Objects

There are several active server objects which enable the programmer to interact with the server and browser. Request: deal with request for information from the client, usually forms

• Reponse-The servers response, such as displaying information back to the browser
• Server-provides functions to create new objects, set server attributes, etc.
• Application-enable the programmer to manage a particular server wide application.
• Session- a specific instance of the application ,the session object provides functions which manage the entire user session/connection
• FileSystemObject, TextStream, Dictionary -provide access to local files, text streams.
• ActiveX data objects provide a programming interface to both OLE DB and ODBC data sources.