Learning About ASP and Server-Side Programming This article describes what ASP and server-side technologies are. There is a brief tutorial that walks you through creating your first ASP pages. This article assumes that you are already comfortable with HTML and you’re interested in learning more about other Web technologies. ASP is a Web server scripting language from Microsoft used for embedding dynamic content into HTML Web pages. ASP stands for “Active Server Pages.”

ASP is a server-side scripting language. What distinguishes ASP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. This means that the server executes your script and translates the content to HTML before sending it to your Web browser. All of the heavy lifting and computing is done on the server. When a user looks at the source for the Web page created by your ASP file, they have no way of knowing what’s going on behind the scenes—all they see is the end result.

In 1994, an incredibly forward-thinking man named Rasmus Lerdorf developed a set of tools that used a parsing engine to interpret a few macros here and there. They were not extravagant: a guest book, a counter, and some other "home page" elements that were cool when the Web was in its infancy. He eventually combined these tools with a form interpretation (FI) package he had written, added some database support, and released what was known as PHP/FI.Then, in the spirit of Open Source software development, developers all over the world began contributing to PHP/FI. By 1997, more than 50,000 Web sites were using PHP/FI to accomplish different tasks— connecting to a database, displaying dynamic content, and so on.

The Domain Name System is one way to resolve host names in a TCP/IP environment. In non-Microsoft environments, host names are typically resolved through host files or DNS. In a Microsoft environment, WINS and broadcasts are also used. DNS is the primary system used to resolve host names on the Internet. In fact, DNS had its beginning in the early days of the Internet.In its early days, the Internet was a small network established by the Department of Defense for research purposes. This network linked computers at several government agencies with a few universities. The host names of the computers in this network were registered in a single HOSTS file located on a centrally administered server. Each site that needed to resolve host names downloaded this file. Few computers were being added to this network, so the HOSTS file wasn’t updated too often and the different sites only had to download this file periodically to update their own copies.

Linux was developed as a freely distributable version of UNIX. UNIX is the most widely used operating system in the world and has long been the standard for high-performance workstations and larger servers. UNIX, first developed in 1969, has a strong programmer-oriented user group that supports the operating system.How did UNIX get its name? It was based on an operating systems called MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing System). Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan were involved the design of a new operating system based on MULTICS that would be much simpler. They called the new operating system UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing System), which was quickly changed to UNIX.