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, it was subsequently included as a free component of Windows Server. It has now been superseded by ASP.NET.
Classical ASP has no mechanism of running itself on non- Microsoft technology platforms like the "The Apache Web Server" (there are some third party products, like ChiliSoft) but, ASP.NET could be run on non- Microsoft Platforms also. In classic ASP, debugging is also a tough task because of limited support due to the interpreted model. In contrast, not only ASP.NET improves the performance over the interpreted model but also provides debugging tools for component developers and pages compiled into classes.
In ASP, an interpreter like Jscript or VBScript is used to execute the server-side code. When an ASP page is requested, the text of that page is parsed linearly. The content that is not server-side script is passed back as it is to the response.
Classic ASP goes a long way toward simplifying Web programming. It is demanding when it comes to writing a new DDL from the very beginning as compared with the easier task to write some HTML and mingle it with a script. But then Classic ASP is not fee of issues. The ASP pages are mass of unstructured code.
