What Do I Need to Run ASP?

So far, we've established what ASP and HTML offers us over and above pure HTML, a little about how it works, and some advantages of using it. But what software do we need in order to work with ASP?

To answer this we need to consider the role that we'll be playing in this book – namely that of the web author or webmaster. In this role, we'll be writing web pages, we'll be publishing them on a web server, and we'll be testing them to see what they look like and whether they work.

• In order to write pages, we'll need a text editor or other web development tool. Notepad works fine for this purpose, but there are plenty of other editors on the market. We'll discuss some of these options in more detail later in the chapter.

• In order to publish the pages, we'll need a web server that supports Active Server Pages. This book describes using ASP 3.0, which comes with a web server called Internet Information Server 5.0 (IIS 5.0), which in turn installs as part of the Windows 2000 operating system. IIS 5.0 supports ASP version 3.0. There are other web servers which also support various versions of ASP, and again we'll discuss some options shortly – but remember that if you're not running Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0 then you'll probably find one or two differences in the way some of the code works. If you're running a later version of Windows (XP, Home, Server 2003, Server 2008) be sure to read about the later IIS versions and web server options.

• In order to view and test the pages, we'll need a web browser! As we mentioned before, ASP is processed on the web server, not on the browser – this means that any browser should suffice. Internet Explorer 5 was the new version at the time the printed book was written so you'll see all the screen pictures here in IE 5. However, later versions of Internet Explore (6 and 7) as well as FireFox (1 or 2) work just fine displaying ASP 3 pages too.

Of course, when you're browsing pages on the Internet or your local intranet, the browser and web server software are generally hosted on two different physical machines – we refer to these machines as the client and the server. In fact, we even illustrated it this way in the diagrams that we've seen so far in this chapter. But it's quite possible to host browser, server and text editor all on the same machine – indeed, it's a technique often used by web developers as they write, test, rewrite and tweak their ASP pages. In this case, the single machine acts as both web client and web server.

Of course, if you're hosting your web server on one machine, and your browser on another machine, you'll need a network so that they can talk to one another. If you're doing it all on one machine, the network won't be necessary.