【正文】 nline. VBScript isn’t the only option anymore, as programmers can now employ the full power that lies behind both Visual Basic (VB) and C within their assemblies.There is no denying the widespread acceptance that .NET received from the developer munity. It’s proven itself to be a welldeveloped framework withsolid ideas on how the programming world should continue to of a software solution that enables anyone to code in any language that is patible with the framework is groundbreaking to say the least.In this chapter we will take a look at how Active Server Pages (PHP) itself began just a couple of years ago and how it has captivated programmers ever since. It has had some problems, of course, but the .NET architecture seems to have found solutions to many preexisting programming have also been changes with how PHP works with the server and client, to provide the user with the information that you want to provide.Even though this is a stable beta, and many people are assuming already that what we are seeing within Beta 2 is basically the “freeze” for many features, it still has a couple of caveats, due to its beta nature. Learning from these problems within the framework can allow for preparation against it.Learning from the History of PHP：You can trace the history of PHP right back to 1995 and the momentous occasion when Microsoft realized they were falling behind in a fundamental shift in the industry by not embracing the Internet. Up until that point Microsoft had been developing their proprietary technologies, tools, and network protocols for the Microsoft Network。 all of a sudden they needed an Internet strategy and fast.Microsoft has gone from a position of playing catchup to one closedominance, with the Internet Explorer Web browser having a stranglehold on the Web browsing market, and Internet Information Server (IIS) installed at the majority of Fortune 1000 panies.The Origins of PHP：Back in the mid ‘90s, when the mercial Web world was still young, there wasnot a great deal of choice of tools for the Web developer who wanted to make his or her Web site a truly useful place to do choices were limited in both available serverside programming platforms and also desktop development tools to produce the solutions. In the end, the programmer was stuck with clumsy Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs using piled languages such as C, Delphi, and Visual Basic, or interpreted scripting languages like Perl or Rexx, and operating system shell scripts on systems such as UNIX.In early 1996 Microsoft had a first stab at improving the situation by including the Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) technology as part of Internet Information Server. ISAPI is an extension to the Windows Win32 API. It was developed as a way to create Web server software that interacts with the inner workings of Internet Information Server, bringing what was claimed to be a fivefold increase in performance. As you can well imagine from this description, as well as the immediate performance increase, it also had a side effect of increasing the plexity of the development for the programmer. It wasn’t for the faint hearted, and it takes some serious hardcore programming knowledge to do ISAPI applications well as ISAPI, Microsoft encouraged developers to embrace their Internet Database Connector (IDC) was a new way to connect Web sites to backenddatabases through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).The ISAPI and IDC technologies lifted Microsoft’s youthful and as yet unproven Web server from being a glorified file server to being a basic interactive application server platform for the first time.Other vendors had tools out there, and several were very popular, such as Netscape Livewire. Livewire was a technology that ran under Netscape’s Web server and used a version of JavaScript for page logic, and also used Java , Livewire had similar limitations to ISAPI in that it was apiled technology and the server needed stopping and starting to make changes visible.Why PHP Was Needed：Not all Web developers have the programming skills needed to write ISAPI applications, and because ISAPI requires the pilation of programs, there are extra steps in producing an ISAPIbased site that slow development down. Novice and intermediate programmers found the need to learn an industrialstrength language, such as C++, and pile even the simplest of their page logic into .dll files a real barrier.Visual Basic programs, although easier to develop, when used for CGI, performed poorly and the overhead hogged resources. Other languages such as Perl require the Web server to launch a separate mandline program to interpret and execute the requested scripts, increasing pageload time and reducing server performance. CGI itself hogs resources because every page request forces the Web servers to launch and kill new processes and municate across these processes. This is time consuming and also uses up precious RAM.Another problem facing development teams in the mid ‘90s was the fact that a Web site is a mixture of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and needed a way to mix the programmer’s code with the designer’s pagelayout HTML and designs without one messing up the were many solutions to this problem, ranging from custom template systems to Sever Side Include (SSI) statements that told the server to execute code based on special HTML ment tags.Databasedriven interactivity was another demand for plex Web sites had just kicked off, and developers needed to supply that demand in a manageable fashion, but the tools available did not make this an easy who could achieve it demanded rewards that matched the difficulty of what they were being asked to do.What