Using FrontPage & Access 2000 to Develop Online Data Forms 

Technical Overview of Web based Technology 

The Web   The Next Generation 

The first generation of the Web can be described as static publishing    pages that relied on 

HTML, static pictures and text.  Web navigation is done through scrolling and hyperlinks.  

The second generation went some way to address the static issue.  The Common Gateway 

Interface (CGI) is a mechanism for managing interaction between the Web server software 

and the browser and it has been around for quite a while.  However, CGI has some 

shortcomings.  The major one is that it adds an extra level to our browser server model of 

interaction.  Also the code that CGI receives and transmits is not easily manipulated by 

many programming languages, so people have to use a programming language that has good 

facilities for manipulating text and communicating with other software.  The best multi 

platform programming for doing this is C, C++ and Perl.  While they can adequately do the 

job, they are very complex to learn. 

The new generation consists of dynamic Web sites.  They are built with a combination of 

languages and technologies   you can use any of these alone, or any number of them 

together and they re all independent (in the sense that you don t have to learn one 

technology before you can learn another).  The technologies are: 

ActiveX controls   created by Visual C++ or Visual Basic (Check your Office 

software for a listing the Active X controls and you will know how much we know 

about it.) 

Java (Please don t confuse Java with JavaScript.  They are different.) 

Script languages   VBScript and JavaScript/Jscript/ECMAScript 

Active Server Pages (ASP) and Dynamic HTML (While ASP is a server side 

technology and DHTML is client side technology) 

XML (Extensible Markup Language) 

Why Using ASP? 

Compared with CGI, ASP runs faster and is simpler to learn.  ASP is NOT a language such 

as JAVA.  It is not an application such as FrontPage 2000.  It is a technology used 

TOGETHER with HTML to build dynamic Web page.  For our needs, it will allow data 

stored in the database to be displayed or updated via the Web without rewriting the static 

HTML codes.  Each ASP section contains within <% %> delimiters. 

What do I Need to Run ASP? 

Assume that you already have a Web browser.  You really DON T need a separate machine 

to run the "Web server".  Since most of us do not have Web master s privilege to our 

university s Web server, we can use our own machine with some Web server software 

installed.  For most of us, the Web server that is the most readily available to us is PWS 

Version 4x. All the hands on exercises for this workshop will be based on PWS V4x.   

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