Active Server Pages (ASP):

ASP is Microsoft's proprietary, open architecture scripting technology that uses variety of programming languages such as 'VB Scripting', 'Java Scripting' etc., to generate dynamic web site content on web servers.

Given below is Microsoft's version of Active Server Pages definition provided in MSDN collection.

"Microsoft® Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting environment that you can use to create interactive Web pages and build powerful Web applications. When the server receives a request for an ASP file, it processes server-side scripts contained in the file to build the Web page that is sent to the browser. In addition to server-side scripts, ASP files can contain HTML (including related client-side scripts) as well as calls to COM components that perform a variety of tasks, such as connecting to a database or processing business logic."