The Alternatives To ASP

Having explained what ASP is, you might be left with one or two nagging questions. For example: "What othertechnologies could do the same job as ASP?" Or, "If Microsoftprovides ASP, then what are the non-Microsoft alternatives?"

Throughout these first two chapters we've avoided thetemptation of describing ASP as something 'new', or as your 'only alternative',quite simply because neither of these statements would be true. ASP is only oneof several technologies that can be used to create more dynamic and interactiveweb pages. Now that you have an idea of how ASP works, you'll be better able tounderstand how it stands in relation to other technologies and its contemporarycompetitors.

Microsoft is behind much of the drive towards the nextgeneration of web technologies. However, Microsoft isn't the only organizationpulling in the direction of interactive web sites: many of its competitors arealso chipping away at the boundaries of interactive web capability.

Interactive web sites can be built with a combination oflanguages and technologies – you can use any one of these alone, or any numberof them together, and they're all interdependent (in the sense that you don'thave to learn one technology before you can learn another). Some exist on theclient side while others (like ASP) work on the web server.