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Lesson 7Microsoft's Active Server Pages
ObjectiveDescribe (ASP) Active Server Pages

Describe Microsoft's (ASP) Active Server Pages

What is ASP?

ASP stands for Active Server Pages - a Microsoft technology.
At first, only the Microsoft IIS Web server supported ASP, but there are other servers available now. However, they are all for the Windows NT operating system. If you use another platform, such as UNIX or Macintosh, ASP is not for you, at least at the moment.
With ASP, Web developers embed small amounts of script in VBscript[1] or Javascript among the HTML tags on a page. For example, you might write:
<H1>Hello, <%=name%>! Welcome Back! </H1>
The % signs identify ASP code, executed on the server before the page is sent to the browser. In this case the value of a variable called name will be inserted into the Level 1 heading. Presumably there was code earlier in this page that set the value of name.

Pros and cons of ASP

The big strengths of ASP are the ease with which you can handle state, and the simplicity of working with databases.
These are the two Web development challenges that ASP was built to tackle, and it handles them well.
Like the CGI solutions, ASP solutions mix your code and your HTML together.
When the look of your site changes, you need to change your code to generate different HTML. While you can do some very powerful things with ASP, the sites you produce will not be as portable as you might like.
What are the advantages of Java Servlets when compared with other server side technologies?

ASP - Quiz

Click on he link below to take a quiz on the server-side technologies.
ASP - Quiz

[1]VBscript:A scripting language that resembles Visual Basic in syntax, but is not compiled and cannot be used to write applications.