Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically generated web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack (ca. 1996), it was subsequently included as a free component of Windows Server (since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server). ASP.NET has superseded ASP.
ASP 2.0 provided six built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, represents a session that maintains the state of variables from page to page. The Active Scripting engine's support of the Component Object Model (COM) enables ASP websites to access functionality in compiled libraries such as DLLs.
ASP 3.0 does not differ greatly from ASP 2.0 but it does offer some additional enhancements such as: Server.Transfer method, Server.Execute method, and an enhanced ASPError object. ASP 3.0 also enabled buffering by default and optimized the engine for better performance.
The use of ASP pages with Internet Information Services (IIS) is currently supported on all supported versions of IIS. The use of ASP pages will be supported on Windows 8 for a minimum of 10 years from the Windows 8 release date.
Read more about Active Server Pages: Summary, Alternative Implementations, Perl-based Alternative Implementations
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