Page 1 of 3: What is ASP?

ASP: Another acronym (As if you hadnt guessed) which stands for "Active Server Pages". This suggests quite a lot about the technology already, in that its processed, or parsed server side and its dynamic in nature, rather than static technologies like HTML.

ASP is a Microsoft technology, browser independent language and it programmatically creates HTML - which is what makes it dynamic.

ASP is not the first offering of dynamic page content, but its one of the most powerful and at the time of writing, the most used server-side scripting technology on the web.

ASP makes interaction possible, which results in offerings such as interative polls, chat, forum discussions, newsletter management and much more.

So, to summarise, ASP is a technology which programmatically creates HTML documents, which are then displayed, or output, to a web browser, such as Microsofts Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or Opera.

Parsing ASP code

In order to correctly parse (process) a selection of ASP code, no matter how long and complex, you need a HTTP webserver.

Generally, ASP pages run under Microsofts Internet Information Server (IIS) which comes as an optional installation from the Windows 2000 and XP Professional CD's. Windows 98 includes a cut down version of IIS called Personal web server (PWS)

The ASP parsing is enabled via the ASP DLL. This enables any piece of code encased within the ASP tags (<% and %>) to be parsed as ASP. The rest of the HTML page will be untouched and processed by the web browser client side.

ASP can be embedded within HTML. The example below shows how you would create a table and place a simple date function to return the current date and time.

<table cellspacing="2">
<tr>
<td>
The date/time is <% = now() %></td>
</tr>
</table>

The process of embedding ASP within HTML is known as "spaghetti coding".

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