Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's first server-side
script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It was
initially marketed as an add-on to Internet Information
Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, but has
been included as a free component of Windows Server since
the initial release of Windows 2000 Server.
Programming ASP websites is made possible by various built-in
objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used
functions useful for creating dynamic web pages. In ASP
2.0 there are six such built-in objects: Application, ASPError,
Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example,
is a cookie-based session object that maintains variables
from page to page. Web pages with the ".asp" file
extension use ASP, although some Web sites disguise their
choice of scripting language for security purposes. The
".aspx" extension is not an ASP page, but an ASP.NET
page, another server-side scripting language from Microsoft,
based on a mixture of traditional ASP and Microsoft's .NET
technology.
Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but any other Active
Scripting engine can be selected instead by using the @Language
directive or the <script language="language"
runat="server"> syntax. JScript (Microsoft's
implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that
is usually available. PerlScript (a derivative of Perl)
and others are available as third-party installable Active
Scripting engines.
Previously called dbWeb, and created by Aspect Software
Engineering, ASP was one of the first web application development
environments that integrated web application execution directly
into the web server, 9 months after the release of NeXT's
(now Apple) WebObjects. This was done in order to achieve
high performance compared to calling external executable
programs or CGI scripts which was the most popular method
for writing web applications at the time it was introduced.
Today there are additional platforms for web application
development that are more common on other operating systems.
Both JavaServer Pages and PHP are more commonly found on
webservers running non-Microsoft operating systems, with
PHP currently being the more common of the two. Also of
note is ColdFusion, a popular Java technology running on
several platforms including Microsoft servers as well as
other platforms.
Prior to Microsoft's release of ASP for IIS 3, programmers
relied on IDC and HTX files combined with ODBC drivers to
display and manipulate dynamic data and pages running on
IIS. The basics of these file formats and structures were
used, at least in part, in the implementation of the early
versions of ASP.
Halcyon InstantASP iASP and Chili!Soft ASP are third-party
products that run ASP on platforms other than the Microsoft
Windows operating systems. Both alternatives to real ASP
don't fully emulate every feature, and may require additional
components that traditional ASP has no issues with, such
as database connectivity. MS access database support is
a particular issue on non-Windows systems.
iASP is able to use the VBScript and JScript languages
unlike Chili!Soft ASP which uses JScript. Microsoft's ASP
can use both and has the potential to have other languages
make use of the scripting engine. iASP was written in Java,
and as such will run any almost any operating system. iASP
appears be no longer available or at least hard to find.
Examples of other languages available are Perl and TCL,
although they are not as widely known or used for ASP scripting.
There is an Apache Webserver mod that runs an ASP-like Perl
script languge.[1]
Chili!Soft was purchased by Sun Microsystems and later
renamed "Sun ONE Active Server Pages", then later
renamed to "Sun Java System Active Server Pages".
Chilisoft ASP was written in C/C++ and is tied rather tightly
to specific web server versions. According to Sun "Sun
Java System Active Server Pages has entered its End Of Life".[2]
Active
Server Pages (ASP)