The situation changed drastically in 1996 with the introduction of Active Server Pages (ASP), an elegant solution to the problem of scripting. Active Server Pages are basically HTML pages that contain VBScript code, which is executed on the server. That’s why they.are also called server-side scripts or simply server scripts. The results of the VBScript statements (if any) are transmitted to the client. The HTML code is transmitted as is. As a consequence, every HTML. page you have authored can be turned into an Active Server Page by changing its extension from HTML to ASP. Not that you’ll see any benefits in renaming yow HTML documents, but you’re ready to elevate them with the inclusion of scripts.
The server scripts produce text and HTML tags that are sent to the client, where they are rendered on the screen. A server script call produce any output, but only HTML documents can be rendered on the client. Since ‘VBScript can contact the objects installed on the server, you are not limited to VBScript’s native commands. You can contact any ActiveX components installed on the server computer to carry out complicated data processing, to access databases, and so on. A server that supports Active Server Pages is called Active Server, and currently two Web servers support ASP: the Internet Information Server and the Personal Web Server.
The Active Server provides a few built-in objects, which are discussed in the section “The Active Server’s Objects,” later in this chapter, These objects simplify the development of scripts by taking care of tasks such as reading the parameters passed by the client, querying databases, saving and recalling cookies on the client computer, and so on. In addition to the built-in objects, you can contact any object on the server from within your script with the CreateObject() function, Let’s start by building a few Active Server Pages, and. then we’ll look at the objects of the Active Server.
