Active Server Pages
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Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).
Programming ASP websites is made easier by various objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functionality 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. Application Center Test is also available for load testing.
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.
Syntax
Here is a Hello World code example:
<% Response.write "Hello World!" %>The <% %> tags are delimiters which tell ASP to treat anything contained within as ASP code and to act on it.
ASP has two types of comment syntax:
' comment -- is terminated at the first line break or ASP terminator (%>)
rem comment -- is terminated at the first line break or ASP terminator (%>)ASP does not have a syntax for multiline comments.
Versions
ASP has gone through five major releases::
- ASP 1.0 (distributed with IIS 3.0) in December 1996,
- ASP 2.0 (distributed with IIS 4.0) in September 1997,
- ASP 3.0 (distributed with IIS 5.0) in November 2000,
- ASP.NET (part of the Microsoft .NET platform) in January 2002 (the pre-.NET versions are currently referred to as "classic" ASP)
- ASP.NET version 2.0 (released on November 7, 2005).
ASP.NET introduced the ability to replace in-HTML scripting with full-fledged support for .NET languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C#. In-page scripting can still be used (and is fully supported), but now pages can use VB.NET and C# classes to generate pages instead of code in HTML pages.
Apache::ASP
[Apache::ASP] provides an Active Server Pages port to the Apache Web Server with Perl scripting only, and enables developing of dynamic web applications with session management and embedded Perl code. [ASP Code Bank]
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