This question is appropriate for intermediate to advanced web developers, webmasters, advanced web designers, Visual Basic developers, Java developers, and web user interface designers/developers. Web developers, webmasters and administrators with two to three years of experience should be able to easily address the issues in this question.

Websites often use a server technology such as ASP (Active Server Pages) or JSP (Java Server Pages) to create websites that offer more dynamic content than static HTML. What are the major differences between ASP and JSP?

Both Active Server Pages (ASP) and Java Server Pages (JSP) provide mechanisms for scripting on the server-side, basically replacing CGI functionality, with newer, more powerful server objects.

ASP allows web page scripting based on the Internet Information Server platform, using either JScript or VBScript. Because ASP is a Microsoft product, it is not particularly cross-platform friendly, and cannot be used with Web servers other than IIS.

JSP is based on the Java programming language, which allows you to script java classes, or Servlets, by using actual java code (albeit in a slightly different, stripped down form) in your web pages. Because Java itself is cross-platform, JSP is available to a number of platforms and Web servers as well, including Apache on a variety of UNIX OSes.

JSP also allows developers to create custom tag libraries for reusing JSP components, and to help separate the text/data content of the page from the scripting code being used within a page. And because JSP is cross-platform, JSP code is generally portable without any additional development work.

Additionally, because of ASPs tight integration with Microsoft products, crashes from poorly written scripts under ASP have a much greater likelihood of crashing the entire server. JSP also utilizes Java threads, which can result in dramatically increased performance over ASP.

However, as with many Microsoft products, ASPs platform limitation can also be a benefit. ASP integrates extremely well with other Microsoft products, such as MS-SQL server, which may offer some organizations an important advantage over JSP, depending on their other server environments. JSP integrates with Microsoft products as well, however, the main motivating factor for utilizing JSP should be the ability to integrate with Java applications.

Candidates will generally have a preference for one technology over the other, which should generally not be a concern, as long as the preference is balanced. Be wary of candidates who fail to recognize any benefits of either system, or who appear to be very rigid in their choice of technology. Also, candidates should be aware that the choice of back-end technology such as JSP/ASP does not directly impact the end-user's choice of browser, etc. The best candidates will recognize advantages to both ASP and JSP, depending on the particular application, and more importantly, corporate environment.

About the author

David Gulbransen has been employed as an information systems professional for over 8 years. He is the CEO of Vervet Logic, a software development company developing XML and web tools for new media development. He is also the author of several professional computing titles, including: Creating Web Applets with Java, The Netscape Server Survival Guide, and Special Edition Using Dynamic HTML, and Special Edition: XML Schemas. David holds a BA in Computer Science and Theatre from Indiana University.