Although it seems to have been around forever, Active Server Pages is only some three-and-a-bit years old. Since its inception in late 1996, it has grown rapidly to become the major technique for server-side Web programming in the Windows environment (and on some other platforms using other implementations that accept the same or similar syntax, such as ChilliASP). But it didn't come from nowhere – the foundations lie much further back than that.

Dynamic Server-side Web Programming

Traditionally, dynamic Web pages have been created using server-side executable programs. A standardized Web server interface specification called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) allows an executable program to access all the information within incoming requests from clients. The program can then generate all the output required to make up the return page (the HTML, script code, text, etc.), and send it back to the client via the Web server.

To make the programmer's life easier, and save having to create executable programs, languages such as Perl use an application that accepts text-based script files. The programmer simply writes the script, and the Web server executes it using a Perl interpreter.