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ASP Overview

     Introduction
     Response
     Request
     Application
     Session
     Server

Welcome to Active Server Pages (ASP). Here is where you will find an overview of the language and some of its' basic features. The overview is comprised of the following sections: introduction, main objects, and wrap up.

Introduction

ASP is an Internet framework that you can use to make your web pages dynamic. The most popular use of ASP is in conjunction with databases. ASP can be used to write applications that access small databases like MS Access or large enterprise databases like SQL Server or Oracle. The most popular and most widely used language to write ASP in is VBScript. VBScript is a scaled down version of Visual Basic. If you know VB a lot of the code will look very familiar. If not, don't worry, given some time you will pick it up.

Since ASP is written using a scripting language it is therefore interpreted code. This means that you do not compile it before you run it. You write the code and then when it is accessed through a web browser on a server, the server interprets the code and sends HTML back to the browser to display. This makes ASP a browser independent solution. This is also the reason that you do not see any ASP code when you do a view source on an ASP web page.

The way that you write an ASP page is to open a text editor, like notepad, write some ASP code in it, and save it as a .asp file. Remeber that all ASP code needs to be placed inside <% and %>. If you do not do this all the code will get printed out as if it were text. At this point the file needs to be placed on a server that supports ASP. After the file is uploaded or moved to a directory on a web server, you can then access it with a web browser to see the result.

The way that ASP works is you call the object you want with a dot after it followed by the method you want to invoke. Then you can pass in any parameters you want to the method. Here is an example:

 object.method "parameter1","parameter2"

or

Response.Write("Print this out...")

      Enough with the introduction let's dive in to the language.

Next Section - Main Objects >>