ASP

Active Server Pages (ASP) is also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic. ASP is Microsoft's the first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages.

ASP was initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, it was subsequently included as a free component of Windows Server 2000. It is now named ASP.NET.

We develop functionality in ASP websites by enabling the active scripting engine's support of the Component Object Model (COM), with each object providing a related group of frequently-used functions and data attributes. In ASP 2.0 we use six built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session.

Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains the state of variables from page to page. Functionality is further extended by objects which, when instantiated, provide access to the environment of the web server. As an example, FileSystemObject (FSO) is used to create, read, update and delete files.

Web pages with the .asp file extension use ASP, although some Web sites disguise their choice of scripting language for security purposes (e.g. still using the more common .htm or .html extension).

Why do we make us of ASP in programming? Pages with the .aspx extension are ASP.NET (based on Microsoft's .NET Framework) and compiled, which makes them faster and more robust than server-side scripting in ASP which is interpreted at run-time; however, many ASP.NET pages still include some ASP scripting.

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