ASP

ASP is technically not a language; it's a Microsoft server technology that's used along with a client-side scripting language. Using a server-side technology with a client-side scripting language is a powerful combination. VB Script is generally the language used with ASP, but JavaScript can also be used.

Anytime you use server-side scripting or technologies, you, of course, need a server. ASP can be used on Window's built-in Web servers, either PWS (Personal Web Server) or IIS (Internet Information Services), depending on the version of the Microsoft Windows operating system installed on your computer. You can also download IIS from Microsoft's Web site. Although this won't allow you to serve your pages on the Web, it will allow you to test your ASP pages locally, as if they were on a remote Web server.

If you don't want to configure your own Web server, you can also use an ASP Web Hosting provider. An excellent ASP host that offers free hosting (as well as paid hosting) is Brinkster. If you're not using the Windows operating system, you can still run ASP by using InstantASP.

If you're using Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, there's no support for running a Web server. Test your ASP pages on a free host instead.

ASP can be embedded in HTML code, similar to the following code that uses ASP to display the current server time. The ASP part of the code is bolded. 

<html>
<head>
<title>What Time is It?</title>
</head>
<body>
The server says the time is:
<%response.write(time())%></body>
</html>

The Web page is saved with an .asp file extension that tells the server to use the ASP scripting engine. The server generates HTML from the ASP code, and then sends HTML output to the client. Unlike HTML, you can't view the ASP source code in the client; you can only view the generated HTML.

The main advantages of ASP are that it's easy to learn and easy to use.

What can you do with ASP?

  • Process forms data from HTML forms.
  • Make dynamic changes to HTML pages.
  • Access a database and return information to an HTML page.

For more information on ASP, see: