ASP stands for Active Server Pages.
ASP is a DLL which resides on windows server. It will parse the ASP commands and allow you as the programmer to create server-side scripts thus allowing a web page to be altered (or created dynamically) before being sent to the user.
ASP.NET is a technology for creating dynamic Web applications. It is part of the .NET Framework; you can author ASP.NET applications in most .NET compatible languages, including Visual Basic, C#, and J#. ASP.NET pages (Web Forms) are compiled, providing better performance than with scripting languages. Web Forms allow you to build powerful forms-based Web pages. When building these pages, you can use ASP.NET server controls to create common UI elements, and program them for common tasks. These controls allow you to rapidly build a Web Form out of reusable built-in or custom components, simplifying the code of a page.
ASP.NET provides a programming model, and infrastructure, to make creating scalable, secure and stable applications faster, and easier than with previous Web technologies.
All of your asp pages will need to be saved with a .ASP extension. This will be filtered though the ASP DLL automatically.
What are some of the advantages of ASP? Some people believe that is much faster to create fully functional service side scripts in ASP then say CGI. You are able to connect to a database with just a few lines of code or mix-and-match ASP wtih HTML. Another advantage is flexibility of how you write your scripts. Some people use VB SCRIPT or JSCRIPT.
ASP will allow you to choose the syntax you develop with you will to define this to allow the interpreter to know what language you are using. An example of how an ASP script woould be called is by starting your code like this:
<@ LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" %>
or
<@ LANGUAGE="JSCRIPT" %>
Basic Syntax:
The ASP.DLL is specifically looking for code that is place in between <% and %>. Any text in between these designators will be parse by this DLL as code. You are able to mix and match this code.
Example (hello_world.asp):
<@ LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" %>
<HTML>
<TITLE>My First ASP!</TITLE>
<BODY>
<CENTER>My First ASP!
<BR>
<% Response.Write("Hello Wordl!- This is ASP") %>
<BR>
Hello world! - This is HTML</CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
The first 4 lines are standard HTML. Line number 5 is where the ASP code starts (note the "<%"). Here an object was inserted. The Response.Write object allows text (or HTML code) to be passed back from the server to the client. What will the output look like? Type it in and give it a try!