Introduction to Active Server Pages
Understanding ASP basics
6/1/98

by Buz Warmkessel

What do Barnes and Noble, Eddie Bauer, Dell, MSNBC, and Quicken have in common? Their content may not be very similar, but they're all using Active Server Pages (ASP) to build sophisticated, database-driven web sites. But what is ASP, and why would you want to use it?

ASP was "born" in November 1996 when Microsoft announced its design of an Active Platform. The Active Platform reflects Microsoft's ideas about how a desktop computer and a server computer should communicate. It consists of two parts: the Active Desktop and the Active Server. The Active Desktop refers to the client side, or the user's side, where HTML files are displayed on a web browser. The Active Server refers to the server-side component. This consists of pages that can be interpreted by the server, hence the term Active Server Pages.

Microsoft's documentation describes ASP as "a server-side scripting environment that you can use to create and run dynamic, interactive, high-performance Web server applications." ASP files combine HTML, scripts, and ASP code to enable a much higher degree of interactivity than is possible with plain vanilla HTML. With ASP, programmers working on Windows NT can tailor the way pages are displayed based on outside information. A different image could be displayed each day of the week, or information could be displayed based on a user's age. This process, which is called condition branching, allows ASP to make decisions about what to display based on certain criteria.

HTML, on the other hand, has no way to make this type of decision. It's a display language. In the real world, you'll probably want to interact with users through a web storefront or personalize their experience by offering tailored content. For this, you need the ability to make decisions.

view a printable version of this article