What is ASP.NET?
Ten years ago, Tim
Berners-Lee implemented the first data transmission across the HTTP protocol.
Quickly adopted by computer science visionaries, and heralded by international
educational facilities as the quintessential means of computerized information
transmission, its popularity expanded into the business sector, and later
became a household word.
In order for the protocol to be used to its
maximum potential, developers would be challenged with the responsibility of
designing applications that could discover and integrate with one another
easily. In order to facilitate this end, certain standards such as HTML, and
later XML, were introduced so that the Web could be used by anyone, located
anywhere, using any type of computing system.
Likewise, software vendors were challenged
to develop not only language and programming tools that would integrate with
the web, but entire frameworks that would present web and enterprise developers
with the tools needed to architect, develop, and deploy these applications
easily. It wasn't until quite recently, with the adoption of XML as a data
transmission and description standard, and the rapid growth in popularity of
the web services paradigm, that the Web's true potential has been realized.
This need has
yielded a host of products from major software vendors such as IBM, Sun
Microsystems, and Microsoft, who introduced a dramatic change in its software
development model with the .NET Framework. In it, Microsoft has created an
integrated suite of components that couple the very foundation of the Web –
markup languages and the HTTP protocol – with proven object-oriented
methodologies.
This book will introduce ASP.NET and
ASP.NET Web Services as a subset of this larger framework, and will educate you
in how these technologies can be exploited to facilitate the very nature of the
World Wide Web itself – true interactivity and platform neutrality.
What is ASP.NET?
Previous server-based web application
frameworks have relied primarily on scripting languages or obscure proprietary
tagging conventions to provide access to server-based resources and components.
Most web development paradigms simply provide hooks via interpreted or
proprietary scripts into applications and components running on the server
operating system. Prior to ASP.NET, it would seem that web development
frameworks fell into one of two categories.
q
Scripts interpreted by a server-side
resource
q
Separate, tiny applications executed
by server-side calls
Classic ASP and ColdFusion programmers
would most likely fall into the first of these categories. If you're
experienced with classic ASP web development practices, you'll understand that
scripted applications can, and usually do, execute at a much slower rate than
compiled applications. Additionally, the scripted platform introduces other
problems, such as weak (or no) integration with security settings and
inefficient resource usage.
The second approach, used widely by Perl
and CGI programmers, yields an entirely different set of problems. Though these
applications execute at a greater rate than their scripted counterparts, they
tend to require huge amounts of memory (as multiple server hits require
multiple instances of the applications), are usually difficult to write and
debug and – most importantly – are not designed with integration in mind, but
rather, portability.
ASP.NET, however, falls outside both of
these predisposed categories, because it provides a truly integrated web
application paradigm. ASP.NET is far more than a simple evolution of either
category; rather, it breaks the trend and arises as the first model for web
application development that is integrated with its underlying framework.
ASP.NET is not an extension or modification to the .NET Framework with loosely
coupled hooks into the functionality it provides. Rather, ASP.NET is a subset
of the framework itself, an actual portion of the .NET Framework that is
managed by the .NET runtime. In essence, ASP.NET blurs the line that once existed
between application development and web development by extending the tools
and technologies previously monopolized by desktop developers into the web
development world.
Buy Fast Track ASP.NET here
© Copyright 2002 Wrox Press
These chapter is written by Brady Gaster, Marco Bellinaso & Kevin Hoffman
and taken from "Fast Track ASP.NET" published by Wrox Press Limited in June 2002; ISBN 1861007191; copyright © Wrox Press Limited 2002; all rights reserved.
No part of these chapters may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, electrostatic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise -- without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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