ASP or Active Server Pages

ASP or Active Server Pages is one of Microsoft’s SSI successor technology, ASP was published in 1996 for serving interactive pages from the server to front end. ASP is no longer developed by Microsoft. The successor technology is ASP.NET, ASP with the appearance of .NET Framework has been replaced in 2002. The term ASP is still used and usually referred as Classic ASP, where as only ASP usually indicates its ASP.NET.

ASP and PHP

ASP was developed and released as add-on for IIS on Windows NT 4.0 based server. ASP is a technology for embedding server-side scripts running HTML pages. MS ASP can in principle be combined with various scripting languages, but is used almost exclusively with VBScript. Almost all the examples and documentation require VBScript. Since VBScript alone is not powerful enough, more complex code in COM or ActiveX component is used. The Microsoft ActiveX Library is only under Windows with the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is available.

PHP, on the other hand provides more speed, more comfortable to code and much better for database access, especially in the open source movement , reducing the cost of licensing.

Position of ASP in today’s Internet

With increased usage of open source softwares for small to big non commercial no product selling websites, PHP and other serverside programing language has grown over ASP. The biggest success of PHP based CMS is WordPress. Other than PHP, various technologies are available for creation of dynamic websites with database connection. Perl One of the earliest and still used by CGI techniques provide interface (Common Gateway Interface). For small applications, this is the easiest way and is supported by each Web server. For larger applications, there can be performance problems due to excessive resource consumption, as will be started for each request a separate process. This can be largely avoided with FastCGI. LAMP provides more speed at lesser cost. Especially in the open source movement LAMP combination is used. PHP is quite easy to learn. Java EE JSP (JavaServer Pages) has similarities to MS-ASP and ASP.NET, and offers similar features. The entire Java language support, including libraries are available. Java is one of the most modern, well-structured and tailored to today’s needs with good programming and networking easier and faster database access. Simple applications benefit from the extensive standardized runtime environment and can be realized for example with the free Tomcat server.