Designing Active Server Pages

Preface

The other day a friend called me with some problems he was having in creating an ASP script. This friend, who is relatively new to ASP but has been writing Visual Basic applications for several years, was in the midst of building a large, data-driven web site. During our conversation, he frustratedly commented that there seemed to be a lot of monotony involved in creating ASP pages.

After I asked him to elaborate, he explained there were several pages that did relatively similar things for his site: one set of ASP pages served as an administration tool for the database driving his site; another set of ASP pages allowed users to enter information into the database. Externally, these pages looked and acted differently, but their core functionality—accessing a database table and adding, editing, and removing entries—was identical. Despite these similarities, my friend was finding that he created separate ASP pages for each task, even if the tasks were related.

This friend is not alone. While the popularity and use of Active Server Pages has grown radically over the past couple of years, the quality of the code has not. As a consultant, author, and editor and founder of http://4GuysFromRolla.com—one of the largest online Active Server Pages resource sites—I’ve created thousands of ASP pages over the past three years. I’ve also worked in several teams designing large web sites using Active Server Pages and have reviewed other developers’ scripts.

When developing ASP pages, I find ...