This section describes the ASP (Active Server Pages) technology that allows you to write VBScript code inside HTML documents for the Web server, IIS, to execute. The VBScript code can provide dynamic contents into the final HTML document to be delivered to the client machine.
We have learned enough about client-side scripting with VBScript in previous chapters,
Let's now look at server-side scripting with VBScript through the ASP technology.
ASP (Active Server Pages): Web pages that contains scripting statements executed by the Web server.
The output of the scripting statements will be merged with the static parts of the page,
and delivered to the browser as the response to the HTTP request initiated by the
Web browser.
ASP is a technology, not a language. You can write the scripting statements in any
language as long as the Web server can recognize them and execute them. The Microsoft
Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 supports two scripting languages: Visual Basic
Script (VBScript) and Java Script (JScript).
Non-ASP pages can also include scripting statements to be executed by the
Web client, browser, not by the server.
An ASP enabled Web server can not only execute the embedded scripting statements,
but it can also provides additional build-in objects and ability to access external
objects. So there are 4 major areas the ASP technology can bring to your Web pages.
We will discuss each of them in details in the following sections:
statements of the scripting language.
Built-in functions of the scripting language.
Web server built-in objects.
External DLL and DOM objects.
Here is a simple example of an ASP page with VBScript language, hello.asp:
