Subtitles of the Movie

In this module we take a look at ASP or ASPs and what are they? Well they’re active server pages; there is another ASP in the Internet world called application service providers. We will not be having a look at application service providers and so when I talk about ASP I’ll be talking about active server pages. So what is ASP? It's a technology used to create web pages dynamically. It’s one of the many technologies that is used to create web pages dynamically. It's the one that is created and employed by Microsoft and thus obviously it’s one of the most popular ways of creating web pages dynamically and so that's why I’m showing it to you as an example rather than showing you one of the more obscure ones. What does creating a web page dynamically mean? Well it means that the actual page that you see in your browser may not exist on the web server at all. At least it doesn't exist until you request it, at the moment that you request it, the server creates it. The server builds it from, probably from a template and a series of parameters that are stored on the server. It can actually also be based on the parameters that you request in your url, in other words the link that you click on may actually help to define what the page is actually going to look like. Now why would you need such dynamically changing pages? Well there is a whole collection of reasons. Usually because businesses are dynamic, they change from day to day and you want your web page to reflect the current state of your business. Maybe the current state of your inventory, or the current state of your finances, or the current state of your employees. So what I guess I’m saying is that the data on a ASP web page doesn't necessarily come from HTML, it can come from a lot of places. It could come from a database. As I mentioned earlier, ASP technology is developed by Microsoft. There are many other dynamic technologies on the market; ASP is just one of the more common. I’ll show you an example of an active server page, I’ll go to Microsoft's website, they use active server pages extensively there and I’ll show you a page that probably got generated as I clicked on it. Here is Microsoft's download center where you can download any of the files that they have available on their server. Now in this list, this is quite a long list, you’ll find just about every product that they currently market. Now that list probably changes from day to day and so this page, which you’ll notice has the extension ASP is dynamically built from the database of all the products that they have. So you can say 'well find me everything for Access 2000 on Windows 98 system' find me all the downloads, find it now please and up it pops and there are 32 of them and we’re displaying 25 of them and there they all are or you could say instead I want to see the most recent and they'll find that. Notice that the page is actually changing. It's a dynamic page, it will modify itself, there are only six of them now but I’m still on the same page. I was not taken to a new page. This current page changed, it’s very interesting technology like that. Anyway this is just a very brief example of dynamically updateable pages. Let’s move on.