InformationWeek

October 11, 1999

Microsoft's Active Server Pages: A Primer
By Jason Levitt

icrosoft's Active Server Pages is the base technology for its application server that runs under Windows NT 4.0. Active Server Pages lets developers create Web applications that use Microsoft's Internet Information Server Web server to serve up dynamic content.

The bulk of ASP is contained in a single, small dynamic link library called ASP.DLL that runs in memory along with Internet Information Server 4.0. ASP.DLL is an Internet Server Application Programming Interface filter module. This means that when a user requests a file with the extension ".asp" from the IIS Web server, the ASP.DLL handles the interpretation of the page, typically generating a page of HTML that is then handed off to Internet Information Server and sent back to the user.

Developers use Active Server Pages to create sophisticated Web applications that can interact with databases and other applications to create a navigable Web site. Developers usually write Active Server Pages applications using a combination of scripting and HTML. By default, they use VBScript, Microsoft's subset of the Visual Basic for Applications language. JScript, Microsoft's version of JavaScript, is also a standard option. The ASP.DLL recognizes what kind of scripting, if any, is used in the ".asp" page and brings in the appropriate scripting engine DLL to interpret the page.

Web applications developed using Active Server Pages can communicate with other applications and services by making use of server-side COM components. ASP includes a handful of built-in components, as well as 12 additional installable components, such as an ad banner rotator, a component for accessing file systems, and a database access component.

Active Server Pages is available on the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack CD-ROM or can be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site.

Return to main story, "Labs: Making Microsoft Multiplatform."

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