ASP stands for Active Server Pages. I'm am not sure of what can be done with it but one area it does handle is communicating with Databases and the production of dynamically (produced on demand) web pages and I beleive is a rival technology to Cold Fusion which is used in this forum for the same purposes. A server that handles ASP allows a mix of HTML and "ASP commands" which can be written in more than one language including VB script.

I'll attempt a very simplified example of what I mean in some form of hopefully understandable language. Let's say I want to keep member records for a forum and produce a web page that lists a member together with real name.

It the first instance, I would create and store the member details in a database, e.g. Microsoft Acesss and could store, MemberID, Nickname, RealName, Email... in a table called Member.

In my ASP web page, I could, together with the regular HTML, include something along the lines of (note, this is not proper coding)

(first I select my records) ChosenRecords = SELECT MemberID, NickName FROM Member

(then I display them) For Each Chosen Record Write Member ID, NickName

When I user calls up this page, the "Write" line would display the appropritate details for each member I selected.

To take it further, suppose I wanted to list members beging with A: Simple, just extend the SELECT bit to say something along the lines of WHERE MemberID LIKE A*. Take it further again, suppose I wanted more flexibility: Simple, I supply my SELECT bit with some user supplied information rather that my rigid A* above...

I hope this makes some sense and that you can see that it does provide a means of producing flexible solutions to problems.

Jon