Active Server Pages

According to the Information Technology Association of America, an application service provider (ASP) is "a company that provides a collection of IT resources to clients or subscribers who access those resources via the Internet or other networking arrangements." With the many challenges that businesses face every day, the last thing they need to worry about are a lot technological issues that are beyond their area of expertise. Many businesses that run their own applications are forced to increase their staffs to include information technology experts who maintain and upgrade application software. Over time, this can become an expensive procedure. Many businesses are cutting costs by outsourcing their applications to an application service provider. While cost is usually the main reason for a company to enlist the help of an ASP, other benefits include saving time, gaining access to top-tier software, and providing scalability. Quite simply, an ASP allows managers the opportunity to do what they do best: run the business.

An application service provider can handle many aspects of a business. As Parveen Bansal explained in The Banker: "The ASP manages and delivers application capabilities to multiple entities from a data center across the private or public Internet on a rental basis. Typical hosted applications include: enterprise resource planning applications (human resources, financials, manufacturing, supply chain management); e-commerce; customer relationship management, (sales automation, customer services and other front-office applications); productivity applications (collaboration, workflow management, project management office); and e-mail and unified messaging services."

Since the application service provider industry is a relatively new area, many businesses have legitimate concerns about it. Security and reliability are just two of the issues that have made businesses reluctant to turn over full control of their applications to an outside source. The ASP industry as a whole is working diligently to address these concerns and prove that their services are valid and cost efficient. Overall, their efforts appear to be successful. As Samuel Greengard stated in Workforce: "Where there was once fear and distrust, there's now growing acceptance of the idea that outside companies can manage hardware, software, and telecommunications remotely. And, make no mistake, these so-called application service providers are forever changing the way companies view technology and how they use it to gain a competitive advantage."

Before entering into a formal relationship with an application service provider, a business should make sure they fully understand the service level agreement (SLA). The SLA is a document that protects the interests of both the business and the ASP, and usually guarantees performance levels in areas such as uptime, bandwidth, and interapplication communication. By taking the time to understand the SLA up front, a business cuts down on the number of potential problems and headaches later.

Small businesses are one sector that stands to benefit from the expertise of an application service provider. It is a quick and affordable way to acquire the necessary applications to run a successful business, especially if the business is a dot-com startup with no in-house staff or technology. Still, a small business (or any business, for that matter) should always make sure that the ASP is specific to their industry, offers a full line of business applications, is able to scale as the business grows, and can manage custom applications and solutions that are unique to the company. The ability of the ASP to integrate with the company's customers, suppliers, and partners can also be a crucial element in the business relationship.

Further Reading:

Bansal, Parveen. "Grasping ASPs." The Banker. March 2001.

Borck, James R. "Enterprise Strategies: Customers Really Can Find Happiness with the Application Service Provider Model." InfoWorld. December 11, 2000.

Cameron, Preston. "Slaying the Competition Dragon: Selecting an Application Service Provider." CMA Management. March 2001.

Greengard, Samuel. "Handing Off Your HRMS: What You Need to Know." Workforce. February 2001.

Grevstad, Eric. "ASP Versus PC." Home Office Computing. March 2001.

Jossi, Frank. "ASP Trend Hits Home." Minneapolis-St. Paul City Business. December 8, 2000.

Lee, Mie-Yun. "Choose or Lose." Entrepreneur. December 2000.

Paul, Lauren Gibbons. "The ASP Dilemma." Electronic Business. January 2001.

Shutovich, Christina A. "ASP Model Can Reduce Short- and Long-Term Costs." Aftermarket Business. March 2001.

Active Server Pages

Developer(s)	Microsoft
Stable release	3.0 (no further versions planned)
Type	Web application framework
License	Proprietary

Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, it was subsequently included as a free component of Windows Server (since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server). It has now been superseded by ASP.NET.

Developing functionality in ASP websites is enabled by the active scripting engine's support of the Component Object Model (COM), with each object providing a related group of frequently-used functions and data attributes. In ASP 2.0 there were six built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains the state of variables from page to page. Functionality is further extended by objects which, when instantiated, provide access to the environment of the web server; as an example FileSystemObject (FSO) is used to create, read, update and delete files.

Web pages with the .asp file extension use ASP, although some Web sites disguise their choice of scripting language for security purposes (e.g. still using the more common .htm or .html extension). Pages with the .aspx extension are ASP.NET (based on Microsoft's .NET Framework) and compiled, which makes them faster and more robust than server-side scripting in ASP which is interpreted at run-time; however, many ASP.NET pages still include some ASP scripting. Such marked differences between ASP and ASP.NET have led to the terms Classic ASP or ASP Classic being used, which also implies some nostalgia for the simpler platform.

Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but any other Active Scripting engine can be selected instead by using the @Language directive or the <script language="language" runat="server"> syntax. JScript (Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that is usually available. PerlScript (a derivative of Perl) and others are available as third-party installable Active Scripting engines.

Contents 1 History 2 Sample usage 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

History

Based on the dbWeb and iBasic tools, created by Aspect Software Engineering, ASP was one of the first web application development environments that integrated web application execution directly into the web server, 9 months after the release of NeXT's (now Apple) WebObjects. This was done in order to achieve high performance compared to calling external executable programs or CGI scripts which were the most popular method for writing web applications at the time. Today there are additional platforms for web application development that are more common on other operating systems. Both JavaServer Pages and PHP are more commonly found on webservers running non-Microsoft operating systems, with PHP currently being the more common of the two. Also of note is ColdFusion, a popular Adobe Systems platform running on several operating systems (including Microsoft servers).

Prior to Microsoft's release of ASP for IIS 3, programmers relied on IDC and HTX files combined with ODBC drivers to display and manipulate dynamic data and pages running on IIS. The basics of these file formats and structures were used, at least in part, in the implementation of the early versions of ASP.

Halcyon InstantASP (iASP) and Chili!Soft ASP are third-party products that run ASP on platforms other than the Microsoft Windows operating systems. Neither alternative to real ASP fully emulates every feature, and may require additional components with which traditional ASP has no issues, such as database connectivity. MS access database support is a particular issue on non-Windows systems.

iASP is able to use the VBScript and JScript languages unlike Chili!Soft ASP which uses JScript. Microsoft's ASP can use both and has the potential to have other languages make use of the scripting engine. iASP was written in Java, and as such will run on almost any operating system. iASP appears to be no longer available or at least hard to find.

Examples of other languages available are Perl and TCL, although they are not as widely known or used for ASP scripting. There is an Apache Webserver mod that runs an ASP-like Perl script language.^[1]

Chili!Soft was purchased by Sun Microsystems and later renamed "Sun ONE Active Server Pages", then later renamed to "Sun Java System Active Server Pages". Chilisoft ASP was written in C/C++ and is tied rather tightly to specific web server versions. According to Sun "Sun Java System Active Server Pages has entered its End Of Life".^[2]

Sample usage

Any scripting languages compatible with Microsoft's Active Scripting standard may be used in ASP. The default scripting language (in classic ASP) is VBScript:

1. <html>
   

2. <body>
   

3. <% Response.Write "Hello World!" %>
   

4. </body>
   

5. </html>
   

Or in a simpler format

1. <html>
   

2. <body>
   

3. <%= "Hello World!" %>
   

4. </body>
   

5. </html>
   

The examples above print "Hello World!" into the body of an HTML document.

Here's an example of how to connect to an Access Database

1. <%
   

2. 	Set oConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
   

3. 	oConn.Open "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=" & Server.MapPath("DB.mdb")
   

4. 	Set rsUsers = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
   

5. 	rsUsers.Open "SELECT * FROM Users", oConn,1,3
   

6. %>
   

See also

• Template processor
• ASP.NET

References

1. ^ "Apache::ASP". Chamas Enterprises Inc. http://www.apache-asp.org/. Retrieved on 2009-01-08. 
2. ^ "Sun Java System Active Server Pages". Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/software/chilisoft/. Retrieved on 2008-12-31. 

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Active Server Pages

• ASP on MSDN
• ASP on w3schools.com
• ASP on DevGuru.com

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