Chapter 12: ASP Programming

Overview

ASP is an acronym for Active Server Pages. ASP programming enables programmers to access the Internet Information Server (IIS) application programming interface (API) using a scripting language such as VBScript or JScript. Although the next generation of ASP, called ASP.NET, is now available to programmers, the legacy of software using ASP is so large that Microsoft cannot abandon its support of the technology for a long time to come.

ASP enables a programmer to produce a web application quickly on a Windows server hosting IIS version 3 or higher. ASP was released to the web development community at a time that Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming and Perl were the competitive technologies that many developers used to make web applications. ASP fits nicely with Microsoft’s ActiveX strategy by providing a means of using functionality encapsulated in Component Object Model (COM) components so the developer can produce n-tier solutions using ASP and COM.

Note 

The code listings in this chapter are available on the author’s web site as mentioned in the book’s Introduction.