This post will feature some of the most commonly employed scripting technologies used on the server side.

CGI scripts are executables that come from the server and make your web pages dynamic and more interactive. Though most web hosts offer this capability to some degree, it is still better to make sure of that at the outset. Some examples of web page features made using CGI scripts are guestbooks, counters, and chat-forums. CGI scripts are best used on Unix and Linux servesr.

ASP (Active Server Pages) was developed by Microsoft and as such, is standard with Windows and only runs on Windows. One feature of ASP is the ability to include script code inside your HTML pages. This makes for dynamic web pages. Many web hosts offer ASP. If you want to use ASP on a Unix system, you would have to employ Chili!Soft ASP. This is Microsoft’s version of ASP that can run on other platforms.

JSP, on the other hand, is really much like ASP, except that it was developed by Sun. It works the same way – you include Java codes in your HTML pages to create dynamic web pages. The big difference is that since it uses Java, JSP is not restricted to any platform.