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Script Components
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See Acronym
Hell and MSDN Online
Voices - Geek Speak Decoded
| IIS |
Microsoft's Internet Information Server. This is the
webserver software. IIS
4.0 for NT 4.0 Server or PWS
for NT 4.0 or Win'95 is free, Internet downloadable
from Microsoft. Visual Interdev 6.0 comes with it and Win'98 comes with
PWS. |
| Front
Page Server Extensions |
Front Page 2000 Server Extensions are Internet downloadable
from Microsoft. They allow you to use Visual Interdev or FrontPage
seamlessly with IIS |
| Front
Page 2000 |
This is a visual, and inexpensive web page authoring tool. |
| Visual
Interdev 6.0 |
Primarily, VI 6.0 is a web page authoring tool. It performs
well as an ASP authoring tool because it is more than an editor, it is an
IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It makes authoring and
programming much sweeter and comes with two new features, Data Environment
(DE) and DTCs (Design Time Controls).
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| ASP |
Without Active Server Pages, IIS is just another web server.
ASP, which is part of IIS (it is an ISAPI application) is a framework for
creating web pages that partially execute on the server instead of in the
browser. ASP allows you to write server script embedded in normal HTML.
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| Scripting
languages |
ASP will call on the relevant scripting engine to interpret
the server side statements that are in the web page. Microsoft produces
VBScript and JScript (otherwise known as ECMA Script or Javascript). Both
are installed as part of IIS. ActiveState
produce Perlscript (free).
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| ADO |
ASP has keywords to interact with the browser. However, to
reach a database, you need to use ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) keywords. ADO
can directly reach a database if it has a specific OLE DB Provider for
that database. Otherwise, it will rely on ODBC (Open Data Base
Connectivity) drivers.
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You need
- a production web server. This is Windows NT 4.0 + at least Service Pack 4
with NT Option Pack 4 (which contains IIS, ADO and other goodies and is
downloadable free). IIS is Internet Information Server and version 4
supports ASP (Active Server Pages) and IDC (Internet Data Connections). ASP
supports server side scripting, IDC is an older but simpler technology that
is not scriptable but can be dynamic because it submits SQL requests to the
database. The scripting will require ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) to connect
to OLE-DB/ODBC databases.
(Optional) - You can configure a Win'95 or an NT 4 Workstation machine with
Personal Web Server (i.e. IIS lite) for testing and development. For the
Internet, you will need an ISP to connect your webserver too or an ISP that
has Microsoft webservers.
- an Intranet of machines or the Internet which use TCP/IP as one of the
network traffic protocols.
- If you want to host an Access database, then ODBC-Jet drivers, but YOU
DO NOT NEED ACCESS.EXE on the web server or the web clients.
- An authoring environment for the development and programming. You could
use Visual InterNotepad (there ain't no such thing, we're talking Windows
Notepad) or your favoured HTML editor (just make sure that it has line
numbers and does not wipe out ASP sections embedded in HTML) or Microsoft
FrontPage or Microsoft Visual Interdev 6.0 or all of the above. If you want
the richest authoring, programming and debugging environment for ASP/ADO,
you will go for Visual Interdev, Internet Explorer (on the
developer's PC) If you want to go into even cleverer programming
and ISAPI/CGI scripting, you will need Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 (which
includes Visual Interdev). Also, Perl and Javascript does run in ASP, but
those are not the preferred languages.
- Web clients (people on other PCs) using a browser that supports cookies.
If you use Netscape, you will not be able to use ActiveX objects on the
client side (blows away half of the tools in the Microsoft arsenal). I work
in an environment which is Netscape dominant so I have to create browser
agnostic web pages.
- Knowledge and skills in:
- fundamental HTML (that's what web pages are
made of) and ASP - see ASP
in a Nutshell A Desktop Quick Reference
- VBScript (read that in MSDN),
Javascript
or even Perl.
(that's what ASP are scripted in)
- ADO ActiveX Data Objects (read that in MSDN).
(that's what connects an ASP to a database source).
- SQL (don't have to be a guru, but the more knowledge, the better) and
relational databases (you bring that over from your Access knowledge).
See SQL Tutorial
for a start.
Along the way, you'll need to know that:
To find out more about Active Server Pages, see the following links below:
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Active Server Pages Links
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An alternative to php, primarily on non Microsoft platforms but
also on MS platforms is the open source php. php can be optimised with zend
Newly release books:
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