Re: ASP

> Tamara wrote
> ******
> I am
> looking for an *in a nutshell* on just what asp is and what it does. I've
> heard it will do everything except butter my bread, but I'm having trouble
> understanding why anyone would use it in the first place.
>
> I only recently learned CSS and I'm struggling with JavaScript, but it
seems
> those would be adequate tools for most sites. I want to grab my company's
> website so I can view it offline, but the asp seems to prevent this.
> ******

> Duncan wrote:
> ******
> Hi
>
> www.hotwired.com/webmonkey have a very good asp tutorial called "My First
> Database" that is well worth reading.
> As for working around the asp, depending on what the site is this will
> probably be very dificult. Asp is usually used with databases and one asp
> page can 'create' hundreds of web pages. For eg. I am doing a site for an
> organisation that has many clubs throughout South Africa. I have all their
> addresses in a database, so I can create 2 asp pages where users can
select
> the club they're interested in and that info will be pulled from the
> database and presented as a web page. Thus 2 pages 'make' over sixty pages
> (there are 67 clubs).
>
> You can't open the pages off line because asp needs to interface with the
> web server. You need an asp enabled server on your computer and all
> databases used in the site to view them off line. Luckily the windows 98
CD
> has one for free. It's called Personal Web Server and is found at
> D:\addons\pws\ (where D is your CD rom) on your win98 CD.
>
> This sounds complicated but it isn't really once you get into it (really,
I
> promise). Go over webmonkey's tutorial, it explains everything very well.
>
> Duncan
> ******

David writes:
******
ASP is a technology that's used on the server side (AFAIK only available on
NT servers for now. Support is expected for Apache/unix soon though).
It's great for putting databases online with very little hassle.  The fact
that it runs on the server and generates 'plain' HTML code, has the benefit
that it's browser independent.
An extra benefit is that the visitors have no way to see the ASP code, they
always get a 'normal' HTML page back (although it has the extension .asp,
the contents has no ASP code in it once processed on the server).
ASP is not a language itself, the code is written using serverside VBscript
or even serverside JavaScript.  Like Duncan said: you'll need Personal Web
Server on a Windows(98) machine to run it offline.

[JavaScript (client-side that is) isn't browser independent.  Far from it
actually. Older browsers don't have a JS interpreter at all, current
browsers behave differently, some people switch of JS even if their browser
supports it, ...]

I'm just an ASP newbie myself, and I've found that the best way (for me) is
to learn by book.
Of course you can learn about ASP and all that on the net (webmonkey is
great indeed) but they only cover a small part.

A book I can really recommend is 'Beginning ASP 2.0'
( http://www.wrox.com ), it doesn't cover everything (they've got another
book for that).
But it covers enough to become dangerous. =)
After reading it, I knew everything I needed to create my first ASP site
(see signature).

HTH
David
--
http://www.kraak.net
music: records & distribution

HTML: hwg-basics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA