Active Server Pages

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's first server-side scripting language and engine for dynamic web pages.

It was first released in December 1996, before being superseded in January 2002 by ASP.NET.

History

Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack (1996), it is included as a component of Windows Server (since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server). There have been three versions of ASP, each introduced with different versions of IIS:

• ASP 1.0 was released in December 1996 as part of IIS 3.0
• ASP 2.0 was released in September 1997 as part of IIS 4.0
• ASP 3.0 was released in November 2000 as part of IIS 5.0

ASP 2.0 provides six built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. A Session object, for example, represents a session that maintains the state of variables from page to page. The Active Scripting engine's support of the Component Object Model enables ASP websites to access functionality in compiled libraries such as dynamic-link libraries.

ASP 3.0 does not differ greatly from ASP 2.0 but it does offer some additional enhancements such as Server.Transfer method, Server.Execute method, and an enhanced ASPError object. ASP 3.0 also enables buffering by default and optimized the engine for better performance.

ASP was supported until 14 January 2020 on Windows 7. The use of ASP pages will be supported on Windows 8 for a minimum of 10 years from the Windows 8 release date. ASP is supported in all available versions of IIS as of 2025.