Developing ASP Components - Softcover

Powers, Shelley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565924460 ISBN 13: 9781565924468

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 1999

Synopsis

The popularity of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology is growing rapidly. Part of the reason is ASP's flexibility: the output of ASP scripts is most commonly HTML, which is included in the text stream returned to the client, making it a convenient way of creating browser-independent web content. But an additional reason--and one that will become more and more important over time, as webapplications replace web pages--is its extensibility. And the most effective way to extend ASP is to develop custom ASP components.However, the techniques for developing custom ASP components, along with the snags and pitfalls of developing custom components, are not well documented. In addition, to successfully develop ASP components one must be a jack-of-all-trades: programming requires some knowledge of COM, of threading models, and of the ASP object model, as well as a mastery of one or more language tools and development environments.That's where Developing ASP Components comes in. The first section of the book explores the topics all developers need to know to develop components for ASP effectively:

• The configuration of the ASP development environment
• ASP components and the Component Object Model (COM)
ASP components and threading models
• ASP components and the Microsoft Transaction Server, which can be used to provide a variety of services to ASP components
• The objects, properties, methods, and events available in the ASP object model

Because more and more developers find themselves using more than a single language tool, the remaining three sections of the book each focus on ASP component development using any of the three major development tools: Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual C++ and the ActiveX Template Library (ATL), and Microsoft J++. Each section carefully focuses on the issues that concern the ASP component developer who is using that particular development environment. These include:

• Accessing ASP's intrinsic objects
• Accessing data using either OLE DB (in the case of C++) or ADO (in the case of VB and J++)
• Creating n-tier web applications with VB
• Handling persistence using MFC along with Visual C++/ATL
• Accessing native code (the Windows libraries, which are written in C) from J++

This thorough coverage of the background information needed for developing ASP components, as well as its focus on the component development in each of three major development environments, makes Developing ASP Components the definitive resource for the ASP application and component developer.

About this title

Review:

Developing ASP Components offers comprehensive instruction for creating and implementing server-side components for the Microsoft Web server platform. You can build Microsoft components with different languages, and author Shelley Powers covers the bases with equal coverage of Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual J++ development.

The first part of the book offers a very readable introduction to Active Server Pages (ASP) components, the Component Object Model (COM), thread implementation, and transactions. This section explains how the elements of the ASP processing environment work together and forms the foundation for the remainder of the book. Inside this overview, the author is careful to point out differences among the trio of featured programming languages.

The next section covers Visual Basic component building, access to ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), and building multiple-tier ASP components. This section illustrates how an easy-to-use language like VB can offer great productivity. C++ is then covered, with a focus on the language's additional control and, in particular, possibilities for object linking and embedding database (OLE DB) data access. For Java, the author includes coverage of JavaBeans and data access with the Windows Framework Classes (WFC).

With proper focus on the key aspects of each language and plenty of practical examples, this title squarely hits the mark as a guide for budding ASP developers. --Stephen Plain

About the Author:

Shelley Powers is a consultant/author with her own company, YASD, currently located in Boston, Massachusetts. In the last several years, she has worked with a variety of distributed and/or Web development applications, with a variety of tools, and on a variety of platforms. In addition, Shelley has also authored or coauthored books on Dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Java, CGI, Perl, general Web technologies, and more. She can be reached at shelleyp@yasd.com.

About this edition

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565924460
• ISBN 13: 9781565924468
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 507