Summary

In this chapter, we have introduced the concept of objects. For our purposes, an object is a programmatic tool that enables us to access a physical item, or a set of associated data. An object is described by its interfaces. These interfaces are broken into three categories:

• Properties – a property's value holds data that describes an attribute of the object.

• Methods are used to have the object perform some task for us.

• Events let the object notify us that something has happened and can also be raised to make something happen and can contain code that we write that can be executed.

In learning how to develop with objects, we have seen how to:

• Set and retrieve information from the object's properties

• Call the methods of an object

With the concepts of objects well in hand, we introduced the Active Server Pages object model. These seven objects encapsulate the functionality offered by the ASP server:

• The Server object provides basic functionality across the web server.

• The Application and Session objects provide the application functionality that is not present in a basic web server.

• The Request and Response objects are used to interpret the information sent by the client and then construct the HTML page that will be sent back in response.

• The ObjectContext object, is used to control transactions within a web page.

• The Error object handles any ASP-generated errors

By understanding the relationships of these objects to one another, we can start to build true applications by using the power of Active Server Pages. The next few chapters will begin to show us how.