Active Server Page (ASP) Technology.
ASP is a scripting technology developed by Microsoft, enabling simple scripts to be developed in VBScript (
A cut-down version of Visual Basic), or JScript (
Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript/ECMAScript).
Pluses.
- Provides a reasonably rich feature set.
- Shortened development timescales.
Minuses.
- Greater server overheads.
- Portability issues.
- Less than ideal debugging environment (Although getting better with Visual InterDev).
Portability
ASP's lack of portability is probably its major shortcoming. Whereas scripting languages such as PERL can run on a number of servers, ASP was designed to run on Microsoft IIS, although plug-ins are available to run ASP on other web servers such as the Apache Web Server.
Code example
The ASP code example demonstrates a typical code fragment used to query a database and return output from the database.
1. Simple SQL Server Database Querying