ASP (Active Server Pages) by Bülent & Resul

Presentation Outline Introduction What is an ASP file? How does ASP work? What can ASP do? Differences Between Similar Technologies Advantages / Disadvantages Future Conclusion

Introduction ASP is short form of Active Server Pages Before ASP the web pages were created with HTML. (Static Content) With CGI, we could have dynamic web applications. To run an ASP file, we need a server which runs IIS

What is an ASP File? An ASP file is an HTML file containing script commands and having an extension of “.asp”. There are more than one scripting languages used such as VBScript, JavaScript, Jscript… The scripts are processed by the server. No dependence of scripting language for web browsers

What is an ASP File? “ ” tags are used to separate the HTML and script codes Code blocks are processed in the server.

What is an ASP File? The code above is an example code of an ASP file.

What is an ASP File? Test Text This is the output HTML codes after ASP file is processed.

What is an ASP File? Test Text This is seen from the browser.

How Does ASP Work? ASP files are only processed when a client requests them from the server. ISAPI There are some.dll files such as ASP.dll which contains standard objects. Functions are called from these dlls. Since these functions are previously defined and known, things can be done with ASP are bounded.

How Does ASP Work? ASP codes do not need to be compiled. There exists a global.asa file which is used to specify events and global session variables which are used for all ASP files in the server. Before any ASP file is processed, global.asa is processed and it defines global events.

How Does ASP Work? The processing of an ASP file starts with the separation of ASP scripts and HTML codes in IIS. Then each script code is processed. The HTML corresponds of these scripts are created, and injected related places. Final HTML codes are sent to the client and displayed by the web browser.

What can ASP do? The most important feature of ASP is creating dynamic pages. You can manage data with database operations such as getting and storing people’s info in the DB. Interactive applications can be implemented, i.e. news type people like may be displayed. Script codes are not sent to the client which brings security.

Differences Between Similar Technologies Cost Speed: PHP files are faster, but JSP files are slower than ASP files Portability: ASP runs on Windows, PHP and JSP can run on other platforms Language: ASP uses VBScript, PHP uses C++ based language, JSP uses Java

Advantages / Disadvantages It gives dynamism to the pages created. Interactive pages reflecting the preferences of the user can be developed One can do bounded things provided by ISAPI functions which brings security It is slower than most of similar technologies Not very much portable

Next Generation of ASP (ASP.NET) It brought some improvements to ASP. ASP.NET files have.aspx extension. The code is compiled. New languages such as C#, J#... can be used New programmable controls Configuration files are generally written in XML

Conclusion ASP is a very good innovation to dynamic web programming. Data obtaining and displaying became more easy and efficient. It works on Windows based servers on IIS When compared to similar technologies, it has advantages and disadvantages over them. As the next generation, ASP.NET provides very many innovations to classical ASP

References us/iissdk/html/526bf565-7f3e-4c60-a78b-bdac64ebb0e0.asp us/dnasp/html/aspover.asp ASPvsPHP.html

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