Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) is a popular web scripting language used to add interactivity to a website. ASP is available for a range of operating systems, but is most widely used on the Windows platform, where it is the dominant web scripting language. It resembles the PHP open source web scripting platform. ASP code itself can be written in a range of different programming languages. The most popular is VBScript, which offers a subset of Visual Basic functionality. JScript, a language based on the JavaScript client-side web browser scripting language is also reasonably popular. A range of other languages such as PerlScript and Python are also used by some software developers.
ASP enabled websites are able to interface with a wide variety of relational databases including Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. ODBC technology allows a wide variety of other databases to be connected to ASP.
ASP allows scripting code to be placed within the HTML markup of a web page, allowing a wide range of functionality to be added to a page. Unfortunately this can lead to application source code that can be difficult to maintain due to the interspersal of HTML with business logic. Microsoft have addressed this in the replacement for ASP - ASP.NET by allowing HTML markup and code to be separated into different files. An ASP software documentation utility such as one of those listed here can assist with making sense of ASP application source code.