ASP

ASP (Active Server Pages) is a standard put in place by Microsoft in 1996; it enables the development of interactive Web applications, i.e. the content is dynamic. Thus an ASP Web page (a file recognizable by the suffix .asp) will contain content that changes according to certain parameters (information stored in a database, user preferences, etc.). By comparison, a "static" Web page (with an .htm or .html extension) will always feature the same information.

ASP is in reality a technology, or more precisely a programming environment, which represents, in the form of objects, interactions between the client browser and the Web server, such as connections to databases (thanks to ADO, ActiveX Data Objects) or even COM (Component Object Model) components. ASP is therefore executed on the server (on the same level as scripts such as CGI, PHP, etc.) and not on the client side (scripts written in JavaScript or Java applets are executed on the browser of the person connected to a site).

ASP can be integrated into the heart of an HTML Web page with the help of special tags that enable the Web server to know that the code inside the tags must be interpreted in order to return a command (generally using HTML code) to the client navigator.

External sources and links:

http://www.asp.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages