Because server-specific APIs use linked C or C++
Because server-specific APIs use linked C or C++ code, server extensions can run extremely fast and make full use of the server’s resources. Server extensions, however, are not a perfect solution by any means. Besides being difficult to develop and maintain, they pose significant security and reliability hazards: a crashed server extension can bring down the entire server. And, of course, proprietary server extensions are inextricably tied to the server API for which they were written and often tied to a particular operating system as well. Figure 1-3. The server extension life cycle Active Server Pages Microsoft has developed a technique for generating dynamic web content called Active Server Pages, or sometimes just ASP. With ASP, an HTML page on the web server can contain snippets of embedded code (usually VBScript or JScript although it’s possible to use nearly any language). This code is read and executed by the web server before it sends the page to the client. ASP is optimized for generating small portions of dynamic content. Support for ASP is built into Microsoft Internet Information Server Version 3.0 and above, available for free from http://www.microsoft.com/iis. Support for other web servers is available as a commercial product from Chili!Soft at http://www.chilisoft.com. For more information on programming Active Server Pages, see http://www. microsoft.com/workshop/server/default.asp and http://www.activeserverpages.com/. Server-side JavaScript Netscape too has a technique for server-side scripting, which it calls server-side JavaScript, or SSJS for short. Like ASP, SSJS allows snippets of code to be embedded in HTML pages to generate dynamic web content. The difference is that SSJS uses JavaScript as the scripting language. With SSJS, web pages are precompiled to improve performance. Support for server-side JavaScript is available only with Netscape FastTrack Server and Enterprise Server Version 2.0 and above. For more information on programming with server-side JavaScript, see http://developer.netscape.com/tech/javascript/ssjs/ssjs.html.
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