Designing Active Server Pages

Chapter 1. Introduction

As the Web has become a more integral part of everyday life and business, web sites have matured from small, static sites into rich, data-driven, complex applications. Several technologies, including dynamic scripting technologies, like Active Server Pages and Perl, have aided along the way, making the Web a more viable application medium. This book focuses on using Active Server Pages to quickly and easily build powerful and dynamic web sites.

Although the server-side tools for building web sites have experienced a nice maturation, the processes used for building these sites have not. What, specifically, is Active Server Page design? What is currently wrong with ASP design? Why hasn’t the art of designing ASP pages advanced? What can be done to improve ASP design? The first three questions will be answered in this chapter. The last one, however, is a meaty one; it is addressed in this chapter, and answered over the next seven chapters.

This chapter not only addresses these questions, but also introduces functions and programming styles that will be used extensively throughout this book.

What Is Application Design?

Designing a single ASP page is trivial. The challenges involved in designing ASP pages arise when large web sites with hundreds of web pages are being crafted. These large web sites are, in their own rights, full-scale applications. Therefore, before we examine Active Server Page design, we will first take a step back and discuss application design. ...