Based on the dbWeb and iBasic tools, created by Aspect Software Engineering, ASP was one of the first web application development environments that integrated web application execution directly into the web server, 9 months after the release of NeXT's (now Apple) WebObjects. This was done in order to achieve high performance compared to calling external executable programs or CGI scripts which were the most popular method for writing web applications at the time. Today there are additional platforms for web application development that are more common on other operating systems. Both JavaServer Pages and PHP are more commonly found on webservers running non-Microsoft operating systems, with PHP currently being the more common of the two. Also of note is ColdFusion, a popular Adobe Systems platform running on several operating systems (including Microsoft servers).
Prior to Microsoft's release of ASP for IIS 3, programmers relied on IDC and HTX files combined with ODBC drivers to display and manipulate dynamic data and pages running on IIS. The basics of these file formats and structures were used, at least in part, in the implementation of the early versions of ASP.
Halcyon InstantASP (iASP) and Chili!Soft ASP are third-party products that run ASP on platforms other than the Microsoft Windows operating systems. Neither alternative to real ASP fully emulates every feature, and may require additional components with which traditional ASP has no issues, such as database connectivity. MS access database support is a particular issue on non-Windows systems.
iASP is able to use the VBScript and JScript languages unlike Chili!Soft ASP which uses JScript. Microsoft's ASP can use both and has the potential to have other languages make use of the scripting engine. iASP was written in Java, and as such will run on almost any operating system. iASP appears to be no longer available or at least hard to find.
Examples of other languages available are Perl and TCL, although they are not as widely known or used for ASP scripting. There is an Apache Webserver mod that runs an ASP-like Perl script language.
Chili!Soft was purchased by Sun Microsystems and later renamed "Sun ONE Active Server Pages", then later renamed to "Sun Java System Active Server Pages". Chilisoft ASP was written in C/C++ and is tied rather tightly to specific web server versions.
