By Ghulam Nabi Shah | July 9th, 2015 |
You will be familiar with the keyword ASP, but what is it exactly? Whenever anyone is learning ASP, the most common questions that first come up are: What is ASP? And how does it work? ASP stands for “Active Server Pages”, also known as Classic ASP is Microsoft’s first server side scripting engine. It is not a programming language but it is a Microsoft technology that allows scripting in your documents. An ASP file contains combination of HTML tags and scripts that run on a web server. ASP works in the similar way of HTML request and response. When you need to make changes in the code, ASP files need to be modified as HTML files does nothing.
ASP files have a file extension of .asp, much like HTML files have file extensions of either .htm or .html. The HTML files that contain the ASP instructions enclose those instructions within tags that look like this: <% and %>. You need to add equal sign <%= to send the results of an ASP instruction to the browser.
ASP programming encompasses scripting in Visual Basic Script, Jscript, Perl, Python, or additional languages. Certain alterations are essential, but the programmer who has written code in these other languages will find ASP programming to be familiar indeed. There are two languages that fit the best for this particular type of programming and they are VBScript and Jscript.
One main use of ASP programming is to help collect data from the audience and demonstrate it at another time. For instance, you could practice ASP programming to request the user to type in his or her name and then show that name on successive pages during the user’s visit. After the name is put in, the programming procedures handover that data to the requisite database, where it can be retrieved by other HTML pages that hold the coding controlling such desires. These types of data requests and displays can be as complex or easy as you want them to be.
With ASP programming, you can upload written text or images to the website. For a perfect example of this look, check out a real estate websites because they take advantage of this functionality very well.
When talking about ASP programming, it also comes in handy when your HTML pages and what they show include gain access to large databases encompassing tons of data. In this instance, you will really appreciate the benefits of not having to modify HTML files when you modernize the limitations of your databases. ASP programming makes this method extremely simple.
This blog is a big help to understand such basics related to ASP before you start developing you own ASP pages. Such basic understanding will increase the speed of learning significantly. However, you should keep in mind that ASP has been outdated with ASP.NET. So, you should utilize your time and effort to learn ASP.NET which is more powerful.
ASP.NET is the next generation of Classic ASP, ASP.NET pages are compiled ones and are faster than Classic ASP. ASP.NET pages come with the extension .aspx and are written in VB or C# and has large set of user controls and XML based controls. This web application framework is powerful and allows programmers to build dynamic websites.
Keep yourself updated with ASP.NET, to know more about migration to .NET, continue reading our blogs.