Dynamics Of Active Server On Pages

ASP, or Active Server Pages, is a scripting language introduced by Microsoft and designed to be embedded within the HTML code for Web pages. The word ‘Active’ in its name refers to the fact that ASP enables your Web pages to be dynamic and interactive -- delivering different database driven information for each Web page query and allowing the user to interact with page objects such as Active X or Java components. With ASP, you can combine HTML pages, script commands, and COM components to create interactive Web pages or powerful Web-based applications, which are easy to develop and modify. The term ‘Server’ in its name is a reference to server-side scripting -- meaning ASP is run on the Web server before any HTML is sent to the user’s browser -- making the content unaffected by the type of Web browser being used. ASP Web pages have the extension .asp which tells the server to run the ASP code before the page is sent to the users computer.
ASP was developed and launched by Microsoft and first introduced on their Internet Information Server (IIS). For this reason, a Web site programmed with ASP is best hosted on a Windows server because most components of ASP work with IIS, which is specific to Windows. ASP is a component of IIS 3.0, which is a free, downloadable, and integrated feature of Windows NT Server 4.0. The ASP feature of IIS 3.0 requires Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 running IIS 2.0 or Windows NT Workstation 4.0 running Peer Web Services. The ASP feature does not require Service Pack 2 for Windows NT 4.0, although it is recommended that all Windows NT systems receive the Service Pack 2 updates. The ASP feature contains a subset of the updates found in Service Pack 2. Installation of ASP will upgrade IIS version 2.0 to version 3.0. The other IIS 3.0 features -- Index Server 1.1, Microsoft NetShow, FrontPage 97 Server Extensions, and Crystal Reports -- add significant functionality to IIS, but are not required to take advantage of ASP.