preface

In the beginning, there was Active Server Pages (ASP)—a page-focused web development framework from Microsoft that enabled developers to build interactive web applications that could process form submissions and communicate with databases. The development model was a simple one: each page in a website was represented by a single file, which had a name and path that shared a one-to-one mapping with the URL for the page. Each file consisted of a mixture of HTML and a scripting language that executed on the web server to generate more HTML. However, as the complexity of an individual page grew, so did its content—often resulting in difficult-to-maintain spaghetti code. Scripting languages lacked any type checking, which easily led to the introduction of bugs that were only discovered at run time.

acknowledgments

about this book

Who should read this book

How this book is organized

About the code

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