ASP Programming

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) let you combine HTML pages, script commands, and COM components to create interactive web pages or web-based applications that are easy to modify. The server-side scripting environment helps you create and run dynamic, interactive web server applications.

ASP files have a file extension of .asp, much like HTML files have file extensions of either .htm or .html. The HTML files that contain the ASP instructions enclose those instructions within tags that look like this: . Notice that unlike HTML, the ASP ending tag does not include a slash. To send the results of an ASP instruction directly to a browser, you add an equals sign: <%=.

ASP programming involves scripting in Visual Basic Script, Jscript, Perl, Python, or other languages. Certain modifications are necessary, but the programmer who has written code in these other languages will find ASP programming to be familiar indeed. The two languages that work the best for ASP programming are VBScript and Jscript.

One common use of ASP programming is to gather data from the user and display it at another time. For example, you can use ASP programming to query the user to type in his or her name and then display that name on subsequent pages during the user’s visit. Once the name is input, the ASP programming protocols transfer that data to the requisite database, from which it can be accessed by other HTML pages that contain the coding guiding such requests. Such data requests and displays can be as complex as you want to make them.