Introduction to Active Server Pages
As you move from page to page on the World Wide Web, you may wonder what sort of intelligence exists on the other end. For example, how does that online music store process orders submitted from its Web pages? How does the shipping company display your package status? The answer is that some type of program is running on the Web server, accepting input from you and dynamically generating Web pages with the results. In the UNIX world, these programs might be CGI scripts or C programs. However, Microsoft has recently entered this area with Active Server Pages, a Web-server component that allows you to use your Visual Basic knowledge to create powerful Web server scripts. This chapter introduces you to Active Server Pages and some of its many features.