Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: instant messaging system for LANs

Posted by mashah@xxxxx.xxx.xx on 2000-03-29

: someone : told my partner in this that the application can be 
: made using ASP or IIS. is this possible? i think it can probably be 
: made with IIS but what about ASP?



Hi,

Can't help you in the VB stuff. I have not done much work in that. 
As far as ASP and IIS is concerned; yes, you can do that in ASP.

IIS is Internet Information Server from Microsoft (for Windows NT 
and Windows 2000). This server is a web server like Apache and 
Omni HTTPd and NetFusion; i.e. it serves the web sites which 
someone requests. 

For example, suppose I have Windows NT as my OS and IIS as 
my web server and I have a free stuff site in my hard disk. Now, 
when I am connected to the Internet and my IIS is running, if 
someone types my ip address in his browser window, a connection 
between his and my computer will be made. His browser will ask 
for a web page from my IIS; which in turn will send the web page 
after reading it from my hard disk.

Now, where does the ASP term comes in? IIS supports ASP, 
which stands for Active Server Pages. ASP is Microsoft's way of 
rivaling the CGI technology. You can also use the free "Personal 
Web Server" from Microsoft for Windows 95 / 98 OS. PWS also 
supports ASP. Moreover, ChilliSoft's ASP can be used to extend 
that capability of existing web servers, like Apache.

ASP is similar to VBScript in syntax. It can be used to generate an 
html page at run time. By run time, I mean that the web page is not 
created before hand. It is created when requested. For example, 
when you search for a term like "assembly language programming" 
at a search engine, the resulting web page is created at run time. It 
is not stored anywhere before your query.

ASP can be used to execute SQL statements. That means, that it 
can work with any database that supports SQL statements and 
has an ODBC driver for it. You can use ACCESS too. For example, 
you can store user ids, passwords and messages in an Access 
database table. Then when somebody logs in at your site, you can 
use ASP to query the database and find messages for that user. 
You can then generate an HTML page containing all the messages 
sent to the user by other users.

I hope you will find this information useful. I would recommend a 
book "ASP Unleashed" for further reading and numerous excellent 
examples.
Muhammad Ali Shah
web: www.redrival.com/mufta
email: mashah@xxxxx.xxx.xx
[BCS V - FAST Institute of Computer Science, Karachi]
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