PerlScript
A Hot Ingredient for ASP
By Shelley Powers
Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology has grown very popular as a Web server-side technique, combining HTML, embedded scripts, and external components to deliver dynamic content. One feature of ASP is that different languages can be used for its scripting portion, though the most widely used ASP scripting language is VBScript—a subset of Microsoft's Visual Basic.
However, just because VBScript is the most popular language used by ASP developers doesn't mean it's the only one, or even the best one to use in a particular circumstance. For instance, Perl has long been synonymous with Web server development, beginning with the earliest uses of the language by CGI, and is still one of the most popular languages among Web developers. But there hasn't been much discussion of using Perl with ASP.
If your organization has been working with Perl, and you're interested in developing for the ASP environment, you don't have to give up your favorite language (or your existing Perl code) to make the transition to the new technology—you can employ Perl for ASP scripting through the use of PerlScript.
A (Very) Brief Overview of ASP
Microsoft originally introduced ASP technology was with the company's own Web server, Internet Information Server (IIS). However, ASP has now been ported to other Web servers through the use of software such as ChiliSoft's platform-independent version of ASP.
