| Lesson 9 | Three parts of Active Server Pages technology. |
| Objective | Describe the three parts of Active Server Pages technology. |
Three Parts of Active Server Pages Technology
Conceptually, ASP has three parts:
- standard objects,
- standard components, and
- scripting engines .
Standard objects
The objects included with ASP represent the various pieces of a Web transaction, including the dialog between client (Request object) and server (Response object), the current state of the conversation (the Session object), the Web application itself (Application object), and the server on which it is running (the Server object).
Web transaction
A transaction is an action that is designed to be atomic: even if there are discrete steps within a transaction, either all the steps happen or none of them do.
For example, to transfer money from one bank account to another account, you would want to withdraw from the first account and deposit to the second. If the deposit fails
(perhaps because the second account number was invalid), then you want to undo (a.k.a. rollback) the withdrawal. Managing transactions over the Web is a hot topic, and Microsoft offers the Transaction Server for just monitoring transactions.
Each of the standard ASP objects will be discussed in detail along with examples in upcoming modules.
Standard components
By using existing pieces of code that are known to work correctly, you can save a lot of time.
The
standard ASP components are prepackaged programs that perform tasks common to Web applications.
You can then build on these components to write your own applications, or write your own components.
The basic components that come with ASP do not necessarily complement one another, they just make some common tasks easier. These standard components will be discussed in more detail later in the course.
Scripting engines
Scripting engines process the results of ASP scripts into HTML. Writing and installing new scripting engines into ASP allow it to support
new scripting languages. ASP includes the scripting engines to interpret both VBScript and JScript code.
Third-party scripting engines (for Perl and other coding languages) are available.
ASP Component Parts - Quiz