What is the Active Server Pages Object Model?

In this chapter, we have looked at how a physical object can be represented by a programmatic object. Thisprogrammatic object has all of the interfaces of the physical object, and itcan be used as an interface between an application and the physical objectitself. But what about objects that don't have a physical counterpart?

In the Active Server Pages programming model, there is awide range of functionality that is accessible to the programmer. ASP helps usto track the state of a user, dynamically generate HTML output, and take datafrom forms to be inserted into a database. All of this functionality makes ASPa rather complex beast. Microsoft was tasked with finding the best compromisebetween offering a simple programming model and providing access to all of thepower that ASP provides. To do this, the functionality was grouped into a setof objects. These objects were then related together into what is known as an object model.

An object model is a representation of a set of objects andtheir relationships to one another. These relationships can take the form ofcontainment, where one object is embedded inside of another. Or, they can takethe form of a parent–child relationship, where one object has a set of childobjects associated with it.

We will not be examining the various methods for groupingobjects together in this book. What is important to us is what the objects thatmake up Active Server Pages are, and how they are related to each other.