Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side script engine for generating web pages. It has built-in objects that make programming the websites easier. The six built-in objects in ASP 2.0 are Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server and Session. Any Active Scripting engine can be used but most ASP pages are written in VBScript.

ASP is different from HTML, but is usually written as scripts within an HTML document. The server runs the ASP scrips which are embeded within the HTML and then displays the results within the page on the browser. ASP is different from JavaScript in that it can interact with other server-side technology such as databases.

The application object in ASP is all the files that can be accessed in any given directory along with its subdirectories. The application object is initialized when the ASP page is opened. It can be used as global variables for the documents, which can be powerful.