4.3 ASP (Active Server Pages)
Developed by Microsoft, ASP is a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive web pages. An ASP file is much the same as an HTML file but has the extension .asp rather than .html. An ASP file and can contain text, HTML, XML, and scripts (Javascript). Scripts in an ASP file are executed on the server side. When a browser requests a regular HTML file, the server simply returns the file. However, when a browser requests an ASP file, Internet Information Services (a free component with Windows 2000) passes the request to the ASP engine. The ASP engine then reads the ASP and executes the scripts in the file. Finally, the ASP file is returned to the browser as plain old HTML.
This may not make much sense here but ASP can dynamically edit, change, or add any content to a Web page, can respond to user queries or data submitted from HTML forms, can access data and databases and return the results to a browser, can customize a web pages to suit individual users and also provides security (since ASP code cannot be viewed from the browser).
Again a simple text editor such as Microsoft Notepad can be used. Asp can be added to HTML pages ike this:
<html> <body> <% response.write("Hello World!") %> </body> </html>
