ASP is Microsoft's offering to the server side programming community. The name stands for Active Server Pages, which basically means that the web pages are spat out by a program on the web server. ASP programming doesn't exist as is really, the programs are written in another language for example Visual Basic Scripting is one of the most popular for making ASP pages.

So where do you get your hands on it? Well if you're using Windows with Personal web server or IIS installed (from the windows CD Rom) you already have it. If you're on any other Operating System I don't think you're in luck, although there are some commercial apps for Linux that will allow ASP to function on an Apache server such as Chili!ASP this should also work on MacOS X.

As with most server side languages it's strongest feature is communicating with a database. ASP's particular strength is that it can talk directly with Microsoft Access databases probably better than any other language. It's downfall is the same, being Microsoft they quite enjoy denying all knowledge of other none - Microsoft products, meaning not as good native support for other database types. Also one of it's features is being able to receive commands in many programming languages, although this makes it more flexible it does take up more memory and processing power.

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by Pete

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