An Introduction To Active Server Pages

What Are Active Server Pages?

You may have visited many sites which take you to pages with the "*.asp" file extension. These are dynamic files that perform processing on the server before sending out HTML (and other pieces of the page, such as CSS) to the browser. These files can:

• Perform calculations on data
• Read and write to databases
• Create custom pages based on variables
• Read and write cookies
• Accept data from HTML forms and perform actions based on those results

The following lessons that I will write on Active Server Pages will be based on the Microsoft VBScript language. It is a very simple language to learn, especially if you have had any prevous programming experience, particularly in BASIC, or Visual Basic.

Where Can I Run Them?

Your web server must be set-up to run Active Server Pages. This normally means it must be on Windows NT running the Internet Information Server. Please check with your system administrator for details on hosting an ASP site.

ASP Tutorial: Next Article - Starting ASP Programming

UPDATE: 26th August 2000 - A new version of ASP called ASP+ has been released my Microsoft for its new platform. More information on the Microsoft.Net site.