• ASP scripts are compatible with any ActiveX scripting language and contain server extensions compatible with HTML.
• Active Server Pages (ASP) are built on a scripting engine, enabling support to multiple scripting languages such as Visual Basic Script (VBScript), JavaScript (JScript), and Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (PERL), among others.
• Developers may create the components to interface with the scripting engine to create new languages.
• Server Side Scripting provides the structure for ASP.
• Application developers use scripting to provide input to components and may use a script for simple functions and calculations.
• ASP is built on a scripting engine that exposes an object model for the Web application developer’s use. VBScript—a subset of Visual Basic—is included with ASP to exploit the developer’s knowledge of that programming model.
• Besides, JScript is included in the default installation of ASP. JScript is a standard for scripting used in most contemporary browsers and is added to capitalize on the developer’s knowledge of that language.

Complex calculations and functions are written with compiled languages for enhanced performance and scalability, creating components to provide the desired functionality.

Active Server Pages (ASP) enables you to combine HTML, scripts, and reusable Microsoft ActiveX server components to create dynamic Web sites. ASP provides server-side scripting for IIS with native support for both Microsoft® Visual Basic® Scripting Edition and Microsoft® JScript™. Processing for ASP occurs on the server. The output of an ASP file is plain HTML customized for the Web browser.

Dynamic Content

Using ASP allows a Web developer to provide, with relatively little effort, dynamic content to users. The Web site can deliver content customized for that particular user based on user preferences, demographics, customer information, or a more fundamental criterion, like whether the user’s Web browser can view the content displayed in frames.

Easy Database Connectivity

The Active Data Object (ADO) component provides standard access to multiple data sources. IIS includes drivers for Microsoft® SQL Server™, Microsoft Access, and Oracle databases. Other databases are supported using Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).
The OLE DB further extends the ODBC standard to permit connection to various data sources. These data sources include Microsoft® Excel files, text files, log files, Microsoft® Exchange servers, indexed sequential access method (ISAM), virtual storage access method (VSAM), AS/400, and many others.

Scalable Server-Side Solution

The IIS administrator may run all applications on the Web server in the same address space for scaling and efficiency. By default, IIS uses threads within the Web server’s address space instead of creating a new process for each user. The administrator can configure a single application to run in a separate memory space to ensure that one application’s problem will not impact the remaining Web applications on the server. Running applications in their memory space requires additional memory.

Integrated State and User Management

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless protocol. The Web server does not maintain state information about the client. Creating dynamic applications requires state management, which ASP can provide. The application’s state is available in both the Application and Session scope using the Application and Session objects. The Application object is a repository for information and things available application-wide. In this sense, they are ‘global‘ objects and data. The Session object maintains information per user—a separate copy of the Session object is created for each application user.

Reusable Software Model

ASP enables developers to reuse software components. Components may also be aggregated. For example, suppose an element provides 85 per cent of the functionality an application requires. In that case, the developer may capitalize on the functions of that component and only code the remaining 15 per cent of the necessary functionality.

The script tag indicates that the text in the title should be interpreted, not displayed and used on both the client and the server.

Client scripting is not Active Server Pages and depends on the browser to implement any scripting language. Scripting language varies with browsers and may even vary within versions of the same browser. Client script is only mentioned here to differentiate between Active Server Pages and server-side scripting.

Script Tag for non-ASP Clients

The script tag for use within browsers is as follows:
PHP Code:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=XXX>

<!—script commands -!>
</SCRIPT>
The type of language supported and the object model for the browser are browser-specific.

Script Tag on Active Server Pages

Active Server Pages on the server use a similar tag, with a few changes. First, a method must specify that the script is to run on the server and not on the client.

A script on an Active Server Page is enclosed in the following tags:

PHP Code:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=XXX RUNAT=SERVER>
<!—Server-side script
–!>
</SCRIPT>
Alternately, for convenience and to reduce the complexity of the scripted pages, the server-side script tag may be shortened as follows:

PHP Code:
<?PHP
<!—Server-side script
–!>
?>
In this case, notice that the script runs on the server and is not browser-specific. The output of this script can display any content to the user.