VBScript in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. VBScript with Active Server Pages

At root, web servers are pieces of software: they receive an incoming client request and handle it by transmitting a stream of bytes back to the client. Getting the web server to do something else—for instance, to respond to user interaction by sending back one byte stream rather than another, to save user state information from page to page, to add data from a database to the byte stream returned to the client, or to perform backend processing on the client request—requires a web server extension. Traditionally,web server extensions for Windows were developed using two technologies: Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Common Gateway Interface for Windows (WinCGI). These are out-of-process extensions that communicate with the web server through standard input and output (in the case of CGI) or initialization files (WinCGI), which are both very inefficient methods that do not scale well. Microsoft Internet Information Server 1.0 added a new technology, Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI), that allowed developers to create applications or filters that ran in the same process as the web server, thus achieving better performance and greater scalability. Unfortunately, developing ISAPI applications and filters required an experienced C or C++ programmer, and thus was out of the reach of the vast majority of web content providers.

Active Server Pages was first introduced in Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0 and ...