active server pages (ASP)

Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side technology within Microsoft's Active Platform, where the program code is executed directly on the server. It is a scripting environment for server-side generation of dynamic web pages, especially from databases. These web pages can contain text and HTML tags, but also commands of a scripting language.

Different platforms can communicate transparently with each other via the ASP pages using the Common Object Model( COM). Thus, the web pages can be connected to databases and interactive content can be added. The possibilities that Active Server Pages offers in terms of web programming are comparable Hypertext Preprocessor( PHP) and Perl. Java, on the other hand, offers Java Server Pages( JSP).

The classic ASP technology, which dates back to 1996, is no longer being further developed by Microsoft, although smaller web page designs are still being implemented in ASP. The successor technology is ASP.NET. The file extension of ASP files is *.asp.