Description
Developing add-on controls and components is emerging as a multibillion dollar industry that is increasingly attracting the attention of developers. This book provides developers with the information and real-world examples they need to create custom ASP components using any of the three major development tools: Visual Basic, Visual C++, and J++.
Full Description
The popularity of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology is growing rapidly. Part of the reason is ASP's flexibility: the output of ASP scripts is most commonly HTML, which is included in the text stream returned to the client, making it a convenient way of creating browser-independent web content. But an additional reason--and one that will become more and more important over time, as web
applications replace web
pages--is its extensibility. And the most effective way to extend ASP is to develop custom ASP components.
However, the techniques for developing custom ASP components, along with the snags and pitfalls of developing custom components, are not well documented. In addition, to successfully develop ASP components one must be a jack-of-all-trades: programming requires some knowledge of COM, of threading models, and of the ASP object model, as well as a mastery of one or more language tools and development environments.
That's where
Developing ASP Components comes in. The first section of the book explores the topics all developers need to know to develop components for ASP effectively:
- The configuration of the ASP development environment
- ASP components and the Component Object Model (COM)
ASP components and threading models
- ASP components and the Microsoft Transaction Server, which can be used to provide a variety of services to ASP components
- The objects, properties, methods, and events available in the ASP object model
Because more and more developers find themselves using more than a single language tool, the remaining three sections of the book each focus on ASP component development using any of the three major development tools: Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual C++ and the ActiveX Template Library (ATL), and Microsoft J++. Each section carefully focuses on the issues that concern the ASP component developer who is using that particular development environment. These include:
- Accessing ASP's intrinsic objects
- Accessing data using either OLE DB (in the case of C++) or ADO (in the case of VB and J++)
- Creating n-tier web applications with VB
- Handling persistence using MFC along with Visual C++/ATL
- Accessing native code (the Windows libraries, which are written in C) from J++
This thorough coverage of the background information needed for developing ASP components, as well as its focus on the component development in each of three major development environments, makes
Developing ASP Components the definitive resource for the ASP application and component developer.
Colophon
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Developing ASP Components is an asp, which is a term applied to various venomous snakes, including the depicted asp viper (Vipera aspis) of Europe as well as the Egyptian cobra (Naja haje), thought to have been the means of Cleopatra's suicide.
Needing to eat at least 50-60 percent of their body weight in food per week, European asp vipers hunt by lying in wait for approaching prey. After grabbing and biting a small rodent or other prey, they release it and wait several minutes for it to stop moving; the generally sluggish viper rarely chases prey. Vipers know their home territory very well, which allows quick escape from their asp-kicking natural enemies, serpent eagles and hedgehogs. This trick hasn't helped them escape from their greatest threat, the expansion of human civilization, which frequently wipes out large sections of their territory.
The chemical composition of asp viper venom can vary from one population to the next, hampering initial antivenin development until 1896, but few viper bite fatalities occur in Europe today. Ellie Fountain Maden was the production editor and copyeditor for
Developing ASP Components; Sheryl Avruch was the production manager; Mary Anne Weeks Mayo, Maureen Dempsey, and Jeffrey Liggett provided quality control. Abby Myers and Sarah Jane Shangraw proofread the book. Robert Romano created the illustrations using Adobe Photoshop 4 and Macromedia FreeHand 7. Mike Sierra provided FrameMaker technical support. Lynn Hutchinski wrote the index.
Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced by Kathleen Wilson using QuarkXPress 3.3 and the ITC Garamond font. Whenever possible, our books use RepKover™, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover™'s limit, perfect binding is used.
The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker 5.5 by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. This colophon was written by Nancy Kotary.
