Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script-engine for dynamically-generated web pages. The introduction of ASP.NET led to use of the term Classic ASP for the original technology.
Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly Internet Information Server) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, it was subsequently included as a free component of the Windows Server Operating System (since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server).
ASP 2.0 provided six built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, represents a cookie-based session that maintains the state of variables from page to page. The Active Scripting engine's support of the Component Object Model (COM) enables ASP websites to access functionality in compiled libraries such as DLLs.
ASP 3.0 provided some enhancements to the 2.0 version, including the Server.Transfer method, Server.Execute method and an improved ASPError object.
ASP supports multiple scripting languages, including VBScript (by default), but there are other options. An alternative Active Scripting engine can be selected with the @Language directive or the syntax. JScript (Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that is built-in. PerlScript (a derivative of Perl) and others are available as third-party installable Active Scripting engines.
Though ASP is considered to be an old technology (first version released on December 1996, last version released on November 2000), the use of ASP pages is still supported today (November 22nd 2018).
According to Active Server Pages (ASP) support in Windows page on support.microsoft.com:
...The use of ASP pages with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is currently supported in all supported versions of IIS.
IIS is included in Windows operating systems, and therefore both ASP and IIS support lifetimes are tied to the support lifecycle of the host operating system. Visit Microsoft Lifecycle Policy for information about the lifecycle policy of your operating system.
