ASP, or Active Server Pages, is a server-side scripting model developed by Microsoft®, designed to enhance the usability of ordinary web pages.
ASP scripts provide a simple yet powerful means to dynamically control a Web page’s output.
To better understand the following topics, we first need to explore the fundamental concepts behind web pages.
NOTE: The ensuing discussions assume you already have some familiarity with HTML, or the HyperText Markup Language.
The world wide web is based on a Request-Response model, which defines the flow of communication between a client browser and a web server.
Before the advent of ASP, a web server’s main role was to simply fetch the requested HTML file, parse the markup elements, and send the response back to the client browser.
ASP evolved mainly to address the limitations of HTML; unlike static HTML pages, ASP files can contain executable scripts that can expand a simple web page’s functionality.
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The scripts are defined at design-time, and processed by the Web server at run-time.
Basically, when the server receives a request for an ASP file, the ASP parser interprets the scripts contained in the file, and dynamically builds the response that is sent to the browser.
ASP makes it easy to build event-driven pages, wherein you define methods that respond to what are called system or user events, such as when a page loads or when a user clicks on an option.
ASP.NET is the next generation of Active Server Pages technology based on Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
It provides an enhanced programming and runtime infrastructure, that makes it even easier to develop and deploy more powerful and fully featured Web applications.
ASP.NET includes programmable server controls you can use on ASP.NET Web Forms, that can display information retrieved from a database, an XML document, or some other data sources.
As can be seen, ASP.NET provides a simple yet powerful means to dynamically control a Web page’s output. It is generally applicable to any Web page whose output would need to be modified, or whose output would depend on input from either the user or from an external data source.
ASP.NET not only takes advantage of performance enhancements found in the .NET Framework, it has also been designed to offer significant performance improvements over ASP and other Web development platforms.
And because ASP.NET makes it easy to generate dynamic content for the Web, it has become the dominant platform for building powerful, interactive Web applications.