What is ASP (Active Server Page)?

ASP is Active Server Page.

Assuming you know absolutely nothing about ASP, it's actually pages that end in .asp extension instead of the usual .htm or .html.

To understand ASP, it's important to know the difference between ASP and regular HTML pages.

In a HTML page, everything on it is static (i.e. it's just a page that the server takes out from it's 'filing cabinet' and sends to the user's browser).

In an ASP, it is dynamic (i.e. what the webmaster actually typed into the page is a set of instructions for the server to go and fetch, gather or calculate some kind of data; then compile it in a nice orderly way and 'write' all the information into html and send the page back to the user's browser).

As a webmaster, what you type into your .asp page is actually mostly Scripts (this is then the instructions mentioned above), usually in Visual Basic Script (VBScript) or JScript and some html. View a sample code here.

Mostly, webmasters use ASP so they can do some cool stuff and especially, use information from a Database in their web site.

For example, I used to use ASP to track every page on my old homepage at Tripod and my old guestbook is a sample of ASP in action. All the information on this guestbook is stored in a simple MS Access file on Brinkster (still, in my books the No.1 free web hosting service that supports ASP and MS Access databases).

What happened previously, with the stats script in ASP was, every time you view a page on this site, a certain JavaScript on that page sends certain bits of data to an ASP page (located in a different server from Tripod). This ASP page then takes all that information and opens a (MS Access) database file and puts the information inside the database file.

Of course, ASP is NOT the only way to do this... there are other 'technologies' like JavaScript itself, CGI/Perl, Cold Fusion, PHP etc...

One of the first places on the Net where I regularly went to learn my 'cut and paste' ASP was here.