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Microsoft's Active Server Pages is a server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an adjunct to Internet Information Server and Personal Web Server and encapsulates many functionalities typically needed by web developers into objects to make them easy to access.
ASP was also made available in plattforms others than Windows by third party Software vendors like Sun Java System Active Server Pages for Unix and Linux.
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Version 1 was released in December 1996 as a part of IIS 3. Version 2 was released in December of 1997 as a part of IIS 4, which was distributed as part of the NT 4 Options Pack. Version 3 was released as a part of IIS 5, which was distributed as part of Windows 2000.
The original release of ASP in 1996 was nothing short of a paradigm shift. What once took hours of complex coding now could be achieved in a short period of time. As time moved on, ASP became easier and easier to implement and the operation of both server and application soon became much more reliable. Still, there were issues here and there which designers of large sites face even today.
Beginning in 2002, classic ASP is being replaced by ASP.NET, which among other things, allows the replacement of in-HTML scripting with full-fledged support for .NET languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C#. In-page scripting can still be used (and is fully supported), but now pages can use VS.NET and C# classes to generate pages instead of code in HTML pages.
ASP is still available for application development but with the release of ASP.NET, it was introduced a new Object Oriented Programming Model which will ensure better performance and code maintenance.
The original ASP technology is now commonly referred to as "Classic ASP" ever since ASP.NET was released.
ASP was created by Microsoft as the main alternative to PHP, although ASP offers a more professional programming feel, as it is not open source, PHP is much more widely used.
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By implementing ASP scripts, developers can avoid common content delivery problems with client-side scripts since it relies on the server rather than the user agent and all the work is done before the HTML is sent to the browser.
It supports source code modules written in one of the compatible programming languages. Some of the languages supported include VBScript, JScript and also PerlScript when available.
VBScript is the most popular programming language used to develop applications for ASP. Its significant similarities with the Visual Basic programming language makes it an ideal choice for developers with experience in the language.
JScript is the name Microsoft uses to refer to its implementation of the JavaScript language. It is popular among developers with prior experience in the language, or developers with experience in C++ or Java due to their similarities.
PerlScript is an implementation of the Perl language developed by ActiveState for the Windows platform. It exposes Windows technologies, such as ASP, to programs written in Perl, and is therefore a popular choice among developers with prior Perl experience on the UNIX platform.
ASP is an interpreted technology. The source code resides on the web server in its original form. When a web page is requested, the ASP runtime loads the source code into the memory, interprets it, and then translates it into the binary language that can be executed by the machine.
Pages can be generated by mixing server-side scripting code (including database access) with HTML and client-side code. Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects, such as a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page.
There are two main benefits to ASP, the first is security and the second is its compatibility with mobile devices such as phones and PDA's.
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