ACTIVE SERVER PAGES

 ACTIVE SERVER PAGES:

Active Server Pages (ASP), is a Microsoft technology that is used to create dynamic Web pages. It means the pages are not static as with HTML pages, but are created on the fly according to what is to be shown to a particular visitor. An example, where this is needed is Web based e mail services such as Yahoo! The ASP technology is marketed by Microsoft along with its Internet Information Server (IIS). There have been four major versions of ASP 1.0 (which was distributed with IIS 3.0), ASP 2.0 (which was distributed with IIS 4.0), ASP 3.0 (which was distributed with IIS 5.0) and ASP.NET, which is part of the Microsoft.Net platform. Before ASP.NET, it was possible to create pages by mixing ASP server side code with HTML and client side scripting code.

The result was an HTML code that could be viewed by your browser. With ASP .NET, support for .NET languages such as C# is introduced. Now, Web pages can be created using the Visual Studio .NET classes, as well as by normal scripting like the old days. The close competitor to ASP is PHP, which is a free server side scripting technology.