Chapter 9 -- Creating Components for IIS and ASP

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Chapter 9

As a developer, you can't ignore the phenomenon of the Web. Businesses are increasingly abandoning the two-tier style of development in favor of browser-based applications for the corporate intranet, and an increasing number of companies are building Web sites targeted at their outside sales force, suppliers, or stockholders. Online consumer sales at companies such as Amazon.com have reached mind-boggling levels. It seems as if every other day another bunch of 22-year-olds turn into multimillionaires when their "dot-com" company has its IPO.

The success of the Web is based on open and ubiquitous standards such as HTTP and HTML, which allow an application to reach a much larger audience than is possible by any other means. When you build a Web-based application, anyone with a browser, an IP address, and an Internet connection is a potential user. Some sites leverage advanced features such as Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and client-side scripting. Other sites use more generic techniques to support down-level browsers and thereby reach a wider audience.

Over the next few years, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is poised to take applications based on HTTP to the next level. HTTP has been an excellent protocol for transmitting formatted content, and now it's quickly becoming the medium for transmitting XML-based data from business to business.

This chapter describes how to build Web-based applications for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. We'll examine the architecture of both Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Active Server Pages (ASP) because they provide the building blocks for communicating with HTTP on the Windows platform.

Because I want to focus on the more advanced aspects of developing Web applications, I'll assume that you've had some exposure to HTML and writing server-side scripts in ASP pages. I'll also assume that you have a basic familiarity with built-in ASP objects such as Request, Response, Session, Application, and Server. Finally, I'll assume that you know how to use HTML forms to capture input data associated with an ASP request. If you aren't familiar with the fundamentals of ASP, I suggest that you find some appropriate resources to supplement this book.