Overview of Active Server Pages

Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script-engine technology for dynamically-generated web pages. Scripting Languages like VB Script and java Scripts are used in ASP. When no scripting language is specified then VB script is assumed, that means VB script is the default scripting language for Active Server pages.
We can combine ASP with Extensible Markup Language (XML), Component Object Model (COM), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to create powerful interactive Web sites.

ASP Compatibility

• To run IIS you must have Windows NT 4.0 or later
• ChiliASP is a technology that runs ASP without Windows OS

How Does Scripting Languages differ from HTML and Programming Languages?

Scripting languages are intermediate stage between programming languages like C, C++, C# and HTML. As we know that HTML is used for formatting and linking of text while programming languages are used for giving a series of complex instructions to computer. Scripting languages falls somewhere between. Scripting languages function more like programming languages when compared with HTML. There are two main differences between programming languages and Scripting languages

1. The rules and syntax of programming languages are more complex and more rigid then scripting languages
2. Scripting languages use interpreter while programming languages use compiler.

ASP Life Cycle

1. Web browser send request to the web server for an ASP page
2. Web server identify the request with the help of the file extension .asp that the request is for an ASP file
3. Web server Search the requested file on the disk and send the file to an special program called ASP.dll
4. ASP.ddl process the file from top to bottom the output of the ASP.dll is HTML
5. The requested file is send back to the client browser.