Overview of Internet Information Services 5.0

Active Server Pages

ASP offers an open, server-application environment in which you can combine HTML, server-side scripts, and reusable COM server components to create dynamic and powerful Web-based business solutions. After the server-side script on an ASP page runs, the results are returned to the client browser in the form of a standard HTML document.

IIS 5.0 natively supports scripts in ASP pages written in both VBScript and JScript. However, you can write ASP applications in any scripting language, as long as you install a scripting engine that conforms to the Active Scripting standard discussed later in this section. Scripts in ASP pages have access to objects that make development quick and easy, including Application, Session, Request, Response, and Server objects.

ASP also supports COM components, which allow you to reuse business logic in other applications. ASP is supported by a number of Web servers, and existing ASP applications can be easily ported to IIS 5.0. In addition, it is often a good idea to rewrite CGI applications as ASP pages, particularly those with functionality that you can quickly and easily reproduce by using ASP built-in objects. For more information, see Migrating a Web Server to IIS 5.0 in this book.