In May 2000 Microsoft estimated that there where over 800.000 ASP developers in the world, making Active Server Pages a high-growth technology. At the same time they estimated that over 500 companies was producing ASP components and applications covering functionality from accounting and electronic commerce to mainframe and other legacy data access.
What can it do?
Everything! Almost. The possibilities are endless, but some key uses are creating webpages based on database searches, personalized pages, display of different pages for different browsers, online shops, password protection, games and form processing.
Take a look!
This is some samples to show you what you can do with ASP.
What do I need to start?
To get the full power and all the features of ASP, you need a MS Windows NT 4.0 machine with IIS 4.0 (IIS 4.0 is a free upgrade to NT included in the NT 4.0 Option Pack) or Windows 2000 Server (IIS 5.0). You can also install a light version of ASP on your Win95/Win98/WinME machine with PWS (Personal Web Server, you can find PWS on the Windows 98 CD-ROM or download it from Microsoft.com, it's included in the NT 4.0 Option Pack) If you run on a UNIX flavour, or for some reason don't want IIS, you can buy ChiliASP. The easiest way to publish ASP pages are getting NT/Win2000 hosting. To find a hosts you should check out HostIndex. If you want to check out free hosting check out this updated list of free hosts from ASPCode.net. (Please note the you should never have a serious or critical site hosted on a free host.) To write the code, you only need a text editor like Notepad, Emacs or EditPad.
What is the future of ASP?
Microsoft is developing a new version of ASP as a part of it's new .NET product range called ASP.NET (previously called ASP+). To learn more about ASP.NET read this free sample chapter from the book Introducing .NET.
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