JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Other Solutions

At this point, let’s digress and look at some other solutions for dynamic web content. Some of these solutions are similar to JSP, while others are descendants of older technologies. Many don’t have the unique combination of features and portability offered by JavaServer Pages.

Active Server Pages (ASP)

Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) is a popular technology for developing dynamic web sites. Just like JSP, ASP lets a page author include logic, such as VBScript and JScript code, in regular web pages to generate the dynamic parts. For complex code, COM (ActiveX) components written in a programming language such as C++ can be invoked by the scripting code. The standard distribution includes components for database access and more, and other components are available from third parties. When an ASP page is requested, the code in the page is executed by the server. The result is inserted into the page, and the combination of the static and dynamic content is sent to the browser.

ASP.NET, the latest version of ASP, adds a number of new features. As an alternative to scripting, dynamic content can be generated by HTML/XML-like elements similar to JSP action elements. For improved performance, ASP.NET pages are compiled as opposed to interpreted, and Common Language Runtime (CLR) languages, such as C#, JScript.NET, and Visual Basic.NET, are used instead of the scripting languages supported in previous ASP versions.

Due to ASP’s reliance on native COM code as its component ...