Active Server Pages (ASP) is the name of a Microsoft technology that can be described as a framework within IIS (the web server of Microsoft) to write web applications. There are three programming languages that can be used within this framework VBScript, JScript and PerlScript. So when one is describing the programming environment s/he should say ASP/VBScript or ASP/JScript or ASP/PerlScript but because VBScript is only used in this environment the term ASP is often used instead of ASP/VBScript and thus it seems that the only way to write in the IIS/ASP environment is to use VBScript.

In reality this is not the case as you can download (free of charge) ActivePerl of ActiveState and when you install their regular Perl distribution you can also automatically setup your IIS web server to enable using Perl within the ASP framework. ActiveState calls this PerlScript though the only difference from standard Perl is the availability of the ASP framework.

What is unique with the ASP/PerlScript solution is that there is a free implementation of the ASP framework on the Apache web server. This implementation is written in Perl and it can be used only via Perl. Apache can run on either Windows or UNIX or Linux so using Perl in ASP suddenly gives you the opportunity to move between web servers and even operating systems.

So if you decide to use the ASP framework but you would like to leave a door open to move to another web server you should use Perl for your development.

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