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Subject:Re: Visual representation of Active Server Pages From:Lou Quillio <quillio -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 28 Mar 2005 13:06:26 -0500
On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:04:13 -0800 (PST), John Posada
<jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> ... when an
> application such as Visio or FP diagrams a page, it does so on what
> it sees when the code is looked at, not when the code is run.
No. The client application (web browser, FP, etc.) never sees the ASP
source, doesn't need to, and couldn't make sense of it anyway.
Static HTML:
1. User requests a page.
2. Server determines that the page exists, and provides it to the client.
Dynamic HTML:
1. User requests a page.
2. Server determines that the page exists.
3. Server is (a) alerted to the fact that this page requires
pre-processing [perhaps by the filename extension] or (b)
pre-processes all pages just in case.
4. Server opens requested page/file and builds an HTML file based on
the ASP programmatics it finds within.
5. Server provides resulting HTML to the client.
The fact that the requested page was pre-processed -- presumably to
achieve customization based on user state, to pull content from a
database, or serve some other programmatic need -- is transparent to
the client. The client gets HTML. As far as it knows, it got a
static HTML page.
(Actually, you can serve more than just HTML with server-side script,
but that's out of scope for this discussion. ASP or pHp or
what-have-you *could* build an Excel file, PDF file, etc., and serve
that.)
> I'd need something that can run the code on the server. Anyone want
> to show me I'm wrong? Please?
Right. You're documenting from the client perspective. You don't
need the ASP source, you need the ASP output. So your devs need to
point you to their dev server, or you need to be running IIS
(Microsoft's web server) locally so you can interact with their ASP
application as a client would.
Oh, and it has to be IIS. ASP is a proprietary Microsoft web
technology and is not used in other environments.
(I used to write a lot of ASP, but that was years ago. It's all pHp
for me now, baby. Also, in Microsoft shops, ASP is subsumed by .NET
any more.)
Hope this isn't obtuse. The upshot is that clients neither process
nor see ASP code, only what the ASP generates for them.
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