An ASP is known as an Active Server Page. It is a server scripting technology that is for building web pages that are both dynamic and interactive. The ASP implementation was created by Microsoft and gives web developers the freedom to create dynamic websites accessed from the many Microsoft COM-compliant data sources available. It is distributed within Microsoft's web specific products including:

Internet Information Server (IIS) ? 2000 / XP Pro / NT4 Personal Web Server (PWS) ? Windows 98

HTML Editors ? Front Page and Visual Interdev

ASP is simple to understand and create, yet powerful enough to allow:

Interaction between the user and the server

Behind the scenes access to databases and other servers

User of the powerful COM components

Support varying types of browsers the web site visitor is using

It uses a combination of standard HTML and text, and XML, but can also access other standard scripting languages such as VBScript and JavaScript. The standard extension for an ASP is .asp, instead of the normal .htm extension. It is incorrect to consider ASP as a language itself; it is a technology that enables web developers to create sites that don't rely on static HTML.

How is an ASP processed?

When an ASP page is requested by a browser the web server knows that its sole task is to interpret any ASP contained with the web page before sending the HTML to the browser. The entire ASP is run on the web server and no ASP will ever be passed to the browser. Any web pages containing ASP cannot be run by simply opening the page in a web browser. The page must be requested through a web server that supports ASP.

What are the advantages of ASP?

ASP is more advantageous than CGI or Perl due to its simplicity and speed. It provides security as ASP code cannot be viewed from the browser and clever ASP programming can reduce network traffic.