Understanding ASP Architecture

One of the big advantages of ASP is that it is language agnostic, meaning that the program isn’t limited to the Microsoft-provided standard scripting languages, such as VBScript. It can be extended by the scripting languages of your choice, as long as this scripting language supports the ActiveX scripting model.

Because a scripting language by itself doesn’t know what a web server is (or how to send data to a client, for example), the ASP engine supplies objects and makes them available to your code-allowing you to interact with the client’s browser, accessing server functionality, and more.

Built-in Asp Objects

Active server pages supplies the following six built-in objects for request and response processing as well as for creating and managing a web application:

Application - stores application wide state information.

Session – New Team maintains information on a per-user basis in this object. A session is the personal storage of each user visiting your site.

Request - consists of all information that is passed to the server from the browser. Allows acess to data that has been sent with forms.

Response - writes HTML and various other information, including cookies and header, back to the client.

Server- provides server functionally for use in active server pages.

Objectcontext- allows you to commit or abort transactions, which are managed by transaction server.

These objects are available immediately in all your ASP pages, with no need to create them before they can be used. How can you access these objects? You can do so by adding code to your ASP pages written in a scripting language.

Scripting language in ASP

* Web site level- changes the default scripting languages for all pages for a specific web site.
* File level- defines the scripting languages for a single page.
* Function level- sets the scripting languages only for a specific function of a page.