ASP is a web server scripting technology available on Windows server operating systems. It is also available on workstations but not fully featured as on a server machine. ASP stands for active server pages, and is a server scripting technology that works together with IIS - Internet Information Services, the web server that comes with Windows.

This scripting technology has been developped a years ago by Microsoft to complement their web server technology with scripting features that were highly needed. Although ASP can be used both with JScript and VBScript, the most popular choice was the use of VBScript. The scripting language is very simple and easy to code and to learn. Although some users may believe that ASP is slow, we did not find a proof of this - on the contrary, it seemed to withstand a lot of loading if coded properly.

The drawback of this web server scripting technology comes from its own simplicity - there are some things needed which are not available in original ASP, like possibility to upload files for example. To add such functionality, additional coding will have to be needed.

Recently, this web server scripting technology has been enhanced by the release of ASP.NET, which is the version of ASP available for the .NET technology platform. This technology is improved and offers a lot of additional features not available in original ASP but it is not compatible with former ASP web server scripting technology due to the fact that the language is different - ASP.NET can use compiled programs developped with C# and C++ and does not support VBSCript anymore; also the pages are compiled, rather than interpreted.

There were some flavours of ASP created to be used under UNIX- based environments but they did not appear to have a great deal of success.