Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ASPError, Request, Response, Server and Session. Each object corresponds
to a group of frequently-used functionality useful for creating dynamic Web
pages (Parnell & Martinez, 2003).
Most ASP pages are written in VBScript. Other scripting languages can be
selected by using the @Language directive. JScript (Microsoft's implementa-
tion of JavaScript) is the other language that is usually available. PerlScript
(Perl) and others are available as third-party add-ons. Programming ASP Web
sites is made easier by various built-in objects, such as a cookie-based session
object that maintains variables from page to page. In 2002, classic ASP was
replaced by ASP.NET, which among other things, allows the replacement of
in-HTML scripting with full-fledged support for .NET languages such as Visual
Basic .NET and C#. In-page scripting can still be used (and is fully supported),
but now pages can use VS.NET and C# classes to generate pages instead of
code in HTML pages. According to news reports in 2002, the market share of
ASP is declining, with the free open source alternative PHP overtaking it in the
server-side scripting market.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET allows you to write dynamic, high-performance Web-applications
with an easy programming model and flexible language options. ASP.Net
simplifies creation of Web applications by greatly reducing the amount of code
that needs to be created compared to classic ASP. Displaying data and
uploading files to the Web server have been made easier and one of the distinct
advantages of ASP.NET also is that it works in all browsers providing great
flexibility for programmers. ASP.NET supports more than 35 .NET languages.
ASP.NET lets you serve more users with the same hardware. Some of the
outstanding feature sets which we will discuss include increased speed in
complied execution, rich output caching, and Web-Farm Session State.
ASP.NET employs dynamic compilation to ensure your application is always
up to date. Most applications that migrated from classic ASP noted an increase
in speed of up to five times over ASP. In terms of output caching, ASP.Net
dramatically increases the performance and scalability of an application by
executing a page just once and saving the result in memory when caching is
enabled on a page. In addition, it sends the result to the user. When another user
requests the same page, ASP.Net serves the cached result from memory
