 Chapter 1
Introduction

The World Wide Web has evolved rapidly from a collection of static pages to a sea of information dynamically exchanged between clients and servers.
The origins of the Web lie in static content. A browser uses the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) to request an HTML file from a Web server. The server receives the request and sends the HTML file to the browser. Until recently developing interactive Web-based applications has been a cumbersome task requiring intimate knowledge of web protocols and low-level data transfer mechanisms.
To serve dynamic content the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) were designed. These gateways enable browsers to send requests (via forms) to executable programs running on the server which generate HTML output that is sent back to the browser. CGI programs, however, can be difficult to maintain because the programs are not integrated with the HTML pages that rely on them.
Today programming tasks have been greatly simplified. Chili!Soft ASP combines Active Server Pages (ASP) technology with server-side object-oriented components to provide an integrated Web development environment. ASP scripts are embedded in HTML files. When the Web server receives a request for a file with the *.asp extension, the Web server passes execution the ASP server. The ASP server then processes the *.asp script and returns the resulting HTML to the Web server. The Web server then sends the resulting HTML back to the browserASP scripts can be written in several scripting languages. Chili!Soft ships with both Microsoft® Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) and Jscript. Furthermore, Chili!Soft ASP allows the use of any scripting language supported by the Web server.
Chili!Soft ASP provides a rich set of mature, standard technology and services that allow Web developers to easily build powerful database and component-driven applications. The Chili!Soft ASP engine also provides developers with direct interaction with the Web server to easily manipulate Web applications with no specific knowledge of a particular Web server's ISAPI or CGI interface.
Web applications can be created by combining HTML, server-side scripting, and server components. The five "Intrinsic Objects" are included to implement much of the overhead associated with complex Web programming. Developers are free to focus on the task of creating interesting, interactive Web content without the need to spend time worrying about low-level programming details. For Web applications requiring more powerful programming, Component Object Model (COM) objects can be created to process data and deliver output with Chili!Soft ASP scripts acting as the "glue" to link COM objects. The Chili!Soft ASP environment also allows the use of JavaBeans, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and CORBA objects in the same manner.
Chili!Soft ASP is the exact functional and syntactic equivalent of Microsoft's Active Server Pages included with Internet Information Server (IIS). Developers can build powerful ASP applications that run on nearly every Web server under Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Hewlett Packard HP-UX, Linux and Windows NT, with more platforms coming soon. Applications developed with Chili!Soft ASP are portable across enterprise servers, making Chili!Soft ASP the ideal platform for developing personalized content and powerful, component-based business solutions for corporate intranets and the Internet.
Copyright © 2000 Chili!Soft
|