Evolution of dynamic content technologies

For the simplest web requests, a browser requests an HTML document, and the web server finds the corresponding file and returns it. If the HTML document includes any images, the browser will in turn submit requests for the image documents, as well. As described here, all of these requests are for static files. That is, the documents that are requested never change depending upon who requested them, when they were requested, or which (if any) additional parameters were included with the request. New versions of the documents might be placed on the server, but at any given time, every request for those documents returns exactly the same results. In such cases, the web server needs only to locate the file corresponding to the requested document, and respond to the web browser with the contents of that file. Much of the data delivered over the web today, however, is dynamic in nature. Up-to-the minute stock prices and the latest weather reports can be viewed.

Unlike traditional CGI programs that require spawning a new process to handle each new request, all of the servIets associated with a web server run inside a single process. This process runs a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is the platformspecific program for running (cross-platform) compiled Java programs.

Microsoft's Active Server Pages, often abbreviated ASP, support multiple scripting languages, including PerIScript, Jscript, and VBScript. PerIScript is based on Perl, and Jscript is based on JavaScript but the default scripting language for ASP is VBScript, a subset of Microsoft's popular Visual Basic programming language. VBScript includes support for accessing ActiveX components, which are compiled code objects that can encapsulate virtually any functionality, including database access and file manipulation. A large body of commercial off-the-shelf ActiveX components is available, and Microsoft provides tools and documentation for writing your own, as well. The major limitation of ASP, however, is that it is available only with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), running under the Windows NT operating system.

As discussed earlier, incorporating dynamic content must ultimately involve some form of programming to describe how that content is generated. Program code, however, tends to be expensive to create and to maintain, so minimizing the need for programming is often a desirable goal. Combining this goal with Sun's objective for robust, full-featured support for Java on the server, a Java-based template system, JSP, was the natural result.

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