ASP History & Information

ASP or Active Server Pages is the Microsoft’s first ever server-side scripting language used for generating dynamic and interactive pages. Initially, Microsoft added it as an add-on to the IIS (Internet Information Services) for Windows NT 4.0 but after its success, Microsoft included it as a free component of Windows Server after the release of Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.

Does anyone out there know what is up with this?

Building webpage using ASP is quite easy; all what you need to do is to learn and efficiently use various ASP built-in-objects which will be briefly discussed later. Each object will provide you with various frequently used functions that you can use for creating dynamic and interactive web pages. For instance, in ASP 2.0, there are six built-in objects; Server object, Session object, Response object, Server object, ASPError object and Application object.

My learning books…. yes a lot of reading….

Another important question that comes in the mind of almost all new ASP learners is that how ASP pages are written? Well, it is simple; all of the ASP pages are written in a scripting language. It is up to the developer, which scripting language to choose, however, most of the asp developers around the world use VBScript and some use Jscript or PerlScript as well. Just remember here that all the scripts are executed on the server so the browser needs not to support scripting. The browser only displays the ASP file. Once you learn, even the basics, about ASP, then you can create dynamic web pages, can respond to user queries, can access database along with returning the results to the browser and can also handle network traffic, at advanced level, as well.

ASP or active was previously known as the dbWeb and it was developed by the Aspect Software Engineering. It was the first WDE (Web application Development Environment) that incorporated the feature of integration of the web application directly into the web server. It was released almost after 9 months of the release of WebObjects (by Apple). ASP introduced various popular methods of developing web applications at the time of its own introduction. ASP, as its history speaks, was an attempt to achieve high performance in comparison with calling other external CGI scripts or executable programs. Before the introduction of ASP, web applications used to access external executable programs or CGI scripts.

Different Versions of ASP
Microsoft has released various versions of ASP. Following are the versions of ASP released by ASP.

• ASP Version 1: it was distributed with the Microsoft IIS 3.0 (December 1996)
• ASP Version 2: it was distributed with the Microsoft IIS 4.0 (September 1997)
• ASP Version 3: it was distributed with the Microsoft IIS 5.0 (November 2000)

The current version of ASP 3.0 is available in IIS 6.0 and also IIS 7.0 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

About ASP Objects:
As mentioned before, ASP provides various objects that provide various frequently used functions that can be used to design interactive and dynamic web pages. Following are the six objects of ASP along with their brief description:

• Server Object: the ASP server object is used to access various properties and methods on the server, as the name implies.
• Response Object: in response to the request made by the browser using ASP request object, the server respond using the asp response object.
• Request Object: as the name suggests, the request object handles the requests made from the browser for a page from the server. Asp request object get all the information from the user about the requested page.
• Session Object: considered to be one of the most important and useful object of ASP. Just consider its name; session, what comes in your mind? Whenever you use any application, you open it and finally you close it; this period is called as a Session. In order for the web server to know who are you and what you do, ASP provides a unique cookie which is created for every user. The cookie is stored at the client side and contains information that can be used to identify the user. The Session Object contains information like name, preferences and unique user id. Server creates session for every user and destroys it as soon as the session expires.
• Application Object: various ASP files, when grouped together, may result in a complete Application. Various ASP files work together in order to perform a common function. ASP object is used to hold all these common function files together.
• Error Object: the ASP Error object was not included in previous versions of ASP; ASP 1 and ASP 2. ASPError object was implemented in the latest release of ASP 3.0 and is also available in IIS version 5 and later. The basic purpose of the ASPError object is to display error messages and detailed information about any error that occurs while executing any script. The ASPError object is automatically created whenever Server.GetLastError is called.

Now, as you have read some basic information about ASP, why not try making one simple ASP webpage yourself. Just carefully go through the following steps and you will end up in making a simple ASP webpage.

• Make sure that you have little understanding of HTML and any scripting language like VBScript or JavaScript before you start working on ASP.
• Make sure that you have IIS installed on your computer.
• You must know the difference between an HTML file and an ASP file. HTML file always have an extension of .html and ASP file has an extension of .asp. HTML and ASP are not the same; whenever a browser request an HTML file, the server simply returns an html file to the browser, however, when a browser request an asp file, the IIS (Internet Information Services) forward the request to the ASP engine where the ASP file is read and script is executed. After that the ASP file is simply returned in a plain HTML format.
• The next thing would be to learn basic syntax of ASP. Its not that difficult, an ASP file contains normal HTML tags just like any HTML file, however, apart from plain HTML tags, an ASP file may contain server scripts as well that are surrounded by delimiters <% and ending with %>. Anything between these tags is considered to be server scripts and they are executed on the server.
• Now lets try the most famous example that every programmer learns; the hello world example. Open a notepad file or any text editor and try the following code that will write output to a browser. Do note that the response.write command in the following piece of code is used to write any output to the browser.

<html>
<body>
<%
response.write(”Hello World!”)
%>
</body>
</html>

The output of the above piece of code would be “Hello World!” that would be displayed on a webpage requested by the browser.