Active Server Pages

Active Server Pages, usually shortened to ASP, was Microsoft's first server-side scripting language and engine for building dynamic web pages. It first appeared in December 1996 as an add-on to Internet Information Services through the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, and it became a component of Windows Server from the initial release of Windows 2000 Server. Three versions were issued: ASP 1.0 with IIS 3.0 in December 1996, ASP 2.0 with IIS 4.0 in September 1997 and ASP 3.0 with IIS 5.0 in November 2000. An ASP page mixes ordinary HTML with script placed between special tags, and the interpreter runs that script on the server so that the output is sent to the visitor's browser. The script was written in VBScript, JScript or PerlScript. ASP 2.0 supplied six built-in objects (Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server and Session), and the engine could reach compiled libraries through the Component Object Model. Microsoft superseded it with ASP.NET in January 2002, after which the original technology was called Classic ASP.