When Active Server Pages was first released it ushered in a new era of web development, allowing developers to take HTML,mix it with a stripped down version of visual basic/javascript/perl and create dynamic content, and web applications. The decision to base things on visual basic allowed them to take advantage of the COM infrastructure that they had been refining for the last year or two and to create a powerful platform on which to build web applications.

Versioning and remote deployment difficulties within COM, the short sightedness that the Windows server products had suffered during their infancy in the server market led to some real problems when trying to deploy/maintain and upgrade web applications. Other tools could be bought off the shelf and used to manage these servers but these products also made public servers even more susceptible to attack by crackers.

Many developers found the best way to deal with all of these problems was simply to wholly embrace the scripting portion of ASP for their development needs. COM components carrying the core business logic were left behind as the difficulties of turnovers, maintenance, etc began to manifest themselves.

This worked well for most applications, as is evident in the number of ASP-based web-applications that can be found online today. However, one of the core difficulties with ASP/VBScript is that it is a typeless language. As more and more database applications were put onto intranets, the validation of the data became more important, there were lots of rules for validating any piece of data that the user may have entered, and the rules could be different for different users, or different times of day. This led to nasty nests of if-then/select statements that quickly became unmanageable.

Something else was needed.

In the summer of 1999 we started to work on a tool that would allow us to solve this problem, allowing for quick and fastvalidation, quick coding, and allow the reuse of validation rules. Over the course of the next 2 years we refined these concepts into what is now known as ASPForms.