Roj's Web Development

Introduction

When the Internet first started to become popular it was full of static content, mainly text and images. Then came sound, animation, applications, plus much more. The 'cool' language of the net for the next couple of years was Java - not to be mistaken for Javascript which is a scripting language that is embedded into HTML pages, which bears more similarity to C than Java, and got the Java based name because as I said Java is cool. Java can be used to write stand-alone applications or applets that are called from web pages. Java Applets and Javascript run on the client machine that views the page, if they have a compatible Java Virtual Machine (JVM) / web browser. However the real benefit of Java is that having a compatible JVM is not dependent on what operating system you have.

In response to the Java and Javascript challenge (initially from Sun and Netscape respectively), Microsoft introduced Vbscript (a subset of VB), and Active Server Pages (ASP) - also a subset of VB. The difference being that while Vbscript is also a scripting language that is embedded into HTML pages. The ASP runs on the server (in this case an NT4 or W2k server with IIS), to produce pages of HTML and Vbscript or Javascript. This makes it easier to cater for client machines not running the latest Internet technology, or the fastest processors.

In response to ASP, Java Server Pages (JSP) have been introduced, JSP are scripts that perform similar functions to ASP, and like ASP run on the server.

Both are good, and have their similarities (for example, they both support ODBC access to databases), and differences (for example, ASP relies on third party applications to run on non IIS servers).

See my Development Blog.

ASP examples

• Calendar (download code)
• Clock (download code)
• Turn a folder of pictures into a thumbnail gallery webpage (I'll post the code for this soon, email me if you want it now)
• Database driven squash results website (code not for free distribution)
• Database driven baseball batting stats webpage (code not for free distribution)
• Database driven discussion forum (code not for free distribution)
• Database driven discussion forum - PDA version (code not for free distribution)
• Database driven blog (code not for free distribution)
• mail me webpage

mail me