WEBSITE CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY
ASP SUMMARY
Active Server Pages is largely based on Microsoft IIS server and Visual Basic. In fact other languages like JSscript can be used to write the scripts and it is now available for the Linux/Apache platform in the form of the Chillisoft ASP product.
The essence of the technology is that the HTML is not actually created until the client browser reaches the web server and triggers the creation of the web page. This newly created web page is made by the web server running a script through the VBScript engine, which sends the HTML back to the web server and then the clients browser.
ASP can incorporate COM DCOM and ActiveX technologies.
ASP is similar in functionality to CGI but faster and with fewer security risks. ASP also has the benefit of only having to be compiled once unlike PHP and is therefore very fast. It can combine well with Microsoft desktop technologies such as Access and FrontPage. IIS 5 is now bundled free with Windows Professional but this is only for 10 concurrent users i.e. only 10 people can be interacting with the database from the website at any one time. IIS may now be “free” in a stripped down form but it also the target of a number of Internet attacks due partly to it’s popularity and Microsofts unpopularity.
Connections between ASP and a database require a driver, which would normally work using ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) or the more modern OLE-DB system [Connolly Begg 2001].
Here is an example of ASP code. Please note that the VBscript on server side programming cannot be seen in the clients browser using the view source feature, which helps preserve programmers work and protects the database network calls from prying eyes. Protecting the databases location and entry mechanism is crucial for ASP and all web page scripting technologies.
Example of VBscript used for server side scripting
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Example 1</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgcolor=Lime aLink=DarkTurquoise>
<P> </P>
<% Response.Write("Hello, world!") %>
</BODY>
</HTML>
This code should be placed in a web editor such as DreamWeaver, FrontPage or preferably notepad and saved with the ASP suffix.