Chapter 16: Server-Side Scripting with ASP

Overview

Up to now, we've been looking at JavaScript that runs in the user's browser and we've been loading our pages directly from our local hard drive. However, in reality our web pages usually sit on a web server that is connected to the Internet or a local intranet. While we could just treat a web server as a dumb file server that does nothing more than pass web pages back to users' browsers, we'll see in this chapter that the web server can process and change pages on the fly before they are passed to a user. Server-side scripting, especially when coupled with database access, can take our website to a completely new dimension of sophistication, way beyond what can be achieved with client-side scripting. For example, e-commerce is mostly made possible with server-side processing.

In this chapter, we'll first look at what server-side scripting is and how it works. Then I'll show how to set up a web server using Personal Web Server, a simple web server that's freely available for the Windows platform, as an example. While this server is not powerful enough to run a big e-commerce website from, it's certainly good enough while we are learning and for simple intranet (corporate network) websites.

We'll then look in more detail at how we insert server-side script into a web page using Active Server Pages (ASP) and what server-side techniques are available to add extra power to our website. We'll finish by adding server-side processing to the Trivia Quiz, in readiness for the next chapter where we will use a database to store the trivia questions.