Page 14 - DCAP604_MODERN_WEB_PROGRAMMING_TOOLS_AND_TECHNIQUES_I

Modern Web Programming Tools and Techniques – I

Notes To counter these problems, Microsoft created higher-level development platforms, such as ASP
and ASP.NET. Both of these technologies allow developers to program dynamic web pages
without worrying about the low-level implementation details. For that reason, both platforms
have been incredibly successful.

Figure 1.4: Server-side Web Application

Request a web page
Run
server-side
application
Return an HTML document

Client Server

The original ASP platform garnered a huge audience of nearly one million developers, becoming
far more popular than even Microsoft anticipated. It wasn’t long before it was being wedged
into all sorts of unusual places, including mission-critical business applications and highly
trafficked e-commerce sites. Because ASP wasn’t designed with these uses in mind, performance,
security, and configuration problems soon appeared.
That’s where ASP.NET comes into the picture. ASP.NET was developed as an industrial strength
web application framework that could address the limitations of ASP. Compared to classic ASP,
ASP.NET offers better performance, better design tools, and a rich set of readymade features.
ASP.NET was wildly popular from the moment it was released—in fact, it was put to work in
dozens of large-scale commercial websites while still in beta form.

Notes Despite having similar underpinnings, ASP and ASP.NET are radically different.
ASP is a script-based programming language that requires a thorough understanding of
HTML and a good deal of painful coding. ASP.NET, on the other hand, is an object-
oriented programming model that lets you put together a web page as easily as you
would build a Windows application.

1.2.1 Advantages of Server-side Programs

The various advantages of server-side programs are:
1. All programs reside in one machine called the Server. Any number of remote machines
(called clients) can access the server programs.
2. New functionalities to existing programs can be added at the server-side which the clients’
can advantage without having to change anything from their side.
3. Migrating to newer versions, architectures, design patterns, adding patches, switching to
new databases can be done at the server-side without having to bother about clients’
hardware or software capabilities.
4. Issues relating to enterprise applications like resource management, concurrency, session
management, security and performance are managed by service-side applications.

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