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Creating Active Server Pages: Overview
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If you are using the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) environment to serve your Web pages, you can use Active Server Pages (ASP) to create dynamic Web-based client/server applications. Active Server Pages let you write a script that gets called every time the server loads the Web page. This script can, in turn, call on Automation objects to obtain information that it includes in a generated HTML page. For example, you can write a Delphi Automation server, such as one to create a bitmap or connect to a database, and use this control to access data that gets updated every time the server loads the Web page.

On the client side, the ASP acts like a standard HTML document and can be viewed by users on any platform using any Web Browser.

ASP applications are analogous to applications you write using Delphi's Web broker technology. For more information about the Web broker technology, see Creating Internet server applications. ASP differs, however, in the way it separates the UI design from the implementation of business rules or complex application logic.

- The UI design is managed by the Active Server Page. This is essentially an HTML document, but it can include embedded script that calls on Active Server objects to supply it with content that reflects your business rules or application logic.
- The application logic is encapsulated by Active Server objects that expose simple methods to the Active Server Page, supplying it with the content it needs.

Note: Although ASP provides the advantage of separating UI design from application logic, its performance is limited in scale. For Web sites that respond to extremely large numbers of clients, an approach based on the Web broker technology is recommended instead.
The script in your Active Server Pages and the Automation objects you embed in an active server page can make use of the ASP intrinsics (built-in objects that provide information about the current application, HTTP messages from the browser, and so on).

The following topics show how to create an Active Server Object using the Delphi Active Server Object wizard. This special Automation control can then be called by an Active Server Page and supply it with content.

Here are the steps for creating an Active Server Object:

- Create an Active Server Object for the application.
- Define the Active Server Object's interface.
- Register the Active Server Object.
- Test and debug the application.

See Also

Overview of COM Technologies

Creating Simple COM Servers: Overview

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