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Introduction to ASP
By Russell Mueller
April 21, 1999
Introduction
Server-side scripting is the hot topic du jour in web development. In a lot of ways, it's a logical evolution of the CGI idea. The *NIX world and Apache have PHP for their server-side, embedded scripting language, and Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's take on the subject. ASP is a small .dll that lives in the same memory space as your HTTP server (usually Internet Information Server). It represents a somewhat different approach to server/client interaction than traditional CGI model and, to give the folks in Redmond some credit, it's a robust and powerful solution.
ASP works as a filter and a redirector for IIS, intercepting incoming client requests with the .asp extension, caching information as needed (such as database queries), thereby taking some strain off of the HTTP server and, usually, speeding things up a bit as well.
What happens, generally, is this: before IIS gets a chance to deal with a client request with an .asp extension, ASP.dll sees the request, snatches it, processes it, and sends the resultant HTML page to the server. Neither the HTTP server nor the client is aware that it's getting the wool pulled over its eyes.
Active Server Pages have a couple of other things going for it. First of all, if you're working on an NT platform and using IIS, ASP and ASP's most useful components are free. ASP is also reasonably language-neutral. You can write your ASP code in the scripting language of your choice: the default is VBScript (although that can be changed via IIS), but if you prefer, you can use JScript or PerlScript by simply declaring it at the beginning of your code. That being said, we'll use VBSript in this tutorial.
One of the main reasons folks are so interested in ASP (or any server-side scripting language for that matter) is database manipulation and file access. ASP is particularly strong in these arenas, with ActiveX controls such as ADO providing some nice tools for manipulating outside data sources. We'll play a bit with the File Access component later in this article.
ASP is also extensible. Components are modules that add specific areas of functionality to ASP, and, although IIS comes with several useful prefabricated components, more can be obtained from third-party vendors or written yourself with anything from Visual Basic to C++ to Java, if you have the know-how. As of late ASP components have become a hot business on the web. If there's a something you want ASP to do, and you aren't able to make it happen with the standard components, it's a fair bet that you can find one on the web that will do the trick or write one yourself.
Finally, before we dive in, it needs to be said that, though ASP is primarily a Microsoft paradigm, it's not limited to Internet Information Server. Because of the popularity that ASP has been enjoying recently, third party vendors have begun to produce a number of ASP implementations for other platforms, most notable ChiliSoft! ASP for Apache Web Server. We'll focus on the IIS version, since that's what's most often found in the wild.
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