Networker: What's in a name?
What's in a name?
BY GREG HARRIS
ASP is a term you hear around the information technology, or "IT", circuits these days. But what does it stand for?
First, it stands for "application service provider". Think of the internet. To connect to the internet, everyone needs an internet service provider (ISP). This is because the internet is one big computer network spanning the world with no one in control (more or less) and anyone is able to connect up if they know someone who's already connected.
That's how ISPs came about. Not everyone had a friend at a university computer department who would be able to connect them, so the ISPs came along, turned it into a paying service, and now are a standard part of the internet landscape.
The idea behind an ASP is that there are probably people out there who want to connect to big computer applications but don't have enough money or a big enough organisation to warrant spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on software licenses. These would be things like billing or payroll or anything else that needs a big reliable computer application, as opposed to things like word processing or spreadsheets which can use small and unreliable applications.
With an ASP, small companies connect to the service which is running their applications remotely. It is like rental or time-share for software. Skeptics say that the purpose of an ASP is to keep making money for big software firms that are running out of big customers to fleece.
ASP also stands for Active Server Pages, a Microsoft product. It is another internet-related technology, this time working with web pages.
The way that a web page works is, when you decide to visit a site on the internet you enter its address in the "www.something.com" format, or you click on a button on another internet page that takes you there. The pages that you look at are made up of words, pictures, sound and maybe video clips.
When web sites were small and simple there wasn't a problem. The person preparing the page started with files containing words, sound, pictures and video and used a formatting system to link all of these together.
Two things went wrong. First, even fairly simple sites grew until they had tens of thousands of pages. Second, marketeers decided that if a site could be modelled to appeal to each different person logging on, then they would be able to sell more things to people.
Along came ASP. With an ASP site the web page doesn't actually exist anywhere until you decide to look at it, and then it is dynamically assembled for you. The bits that make it up are stored in a database, a place for storing bits.
How could it be? Two technologies, both in the internet, both with the same acronym? Surprisingly, it isn't new.
The computer field is littered with acronyms with multiple meanings, like ATM (automatic teller machine, asynchronous transfer mode), MAU (medium attachment unit, media access unit), SDLC (systems development life cycle, synchronous data link control), POP (point of presence, post office protocol). It isn't enough just to know the jargon, you have to know the context.
I think the most positive spin you could put on this is that the computer corporations don't give a damn whether people have any clue about the technologies that control so much of their lives. A more negative view is that they are being deliberately obscure, trying to maintain the division between knowledge and ignorance.