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Setting up an ASP development environment for Dreamweaver

Set up an ASP application server

To set up an ASP development environment, you must first set up or get access to an ASP application server. An application server is software that helps a web server process web pages containing server-side scripts or tags. When such a page is requested by a browser, the web server hands the page off to the application server for processing before sending the page to the browser.

If you use Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) as your web server software, then you don't need to set up a separate ASP application server. IIS doubles as an ASP application server.

This section provides instructions for the two most common system configurations for ASP: one in which IIS is installed on your hard disk, and one in which IIS is installed on a remote Windows computer.

This section contains the following topics:

Server configuration overview

Install IIS on your local computer

Test the application server

Create a root folder for your application

Server configuration overview

Figure 1 shows the two server configurations described in this section:

Figure 1. Local and Remote IIS configurations.

Make sure Microsoft IIS is installed and running on your computer or on a remote Windows computer. A quick way to check whether IIS is installed on a computer is to look at the folder structure to see whether it contains a C:\Inetpub folder. IIS creates this folder during installation.

If you're a Windows XP Professional user, you can install IIS and run it on the same computer as Dreamweaver. For instructions, see the next section, Install IIS on your local computer.

If you're a Macintosh user, you can use Dreamweaver to connect to a remote Windows computer running IIS or to a web hosting service with an ASP plan. For more information, see Specify your testing or production server.

Install IIS on your local computer

Windows XP Professional users can install and run IIS on their local computers.

First, check to see if IIS is installed and running on your system by looking for the C:\Inetpub folder. If it doesn't exist, install IIS as follows:

1. Select Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs, or Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs.
2. Select Add/Remove Windows Components.
3. Select Internet Information Services (IIS) and click Next.
4. Follow the installation instructions and then test the server as described next.

Test the application server

To test the IIS application server:

1. In Dreamweaver or any text editor, create a plain text file and call it timetest.asp.

2. In the file, enter the following code:

   <p>This page was created at <b>
   <%= Time %>
   </b> on the computer running the ASP server.</p>

   This code displays the time when the page was processed on the server.

3. Copy the file to the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot folder of the computer running IIS.
4. In your web browser, enter the URL of your test page, and then press Enter.

If IIS is running on your local computer, enter the following URL:

http://localhost/timetest.asp

If IIS is running on a networked computer, use the networked computer's name as the domain name. For example, if the name of the computer running IIS is rockford-pc, enter the following URL in your browser:

http://rockford-pc/timetest.asp

If the test page opens and displays the current time, the application server is running normally. The specified time is known as dynamic content because it changes every time you request the page. Click your browser's Refresh button to generate a new page with a different time.

If the page doesn't work as expected, check for the following possible errors:

• The file does not have an .asp extension.
• You typed the page's file path (C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\timetest.asp) instead of its URL (for example, http://localhost/timetest.asp) in the browser's address text box.
• If you type a file path in the browser (as you might be used to doing with normal HTML pages), you bypass the web server and application server. As a result, your page never gets processed by the server.
• The URL contains a typing mistake. Check for errors and make sure the filename is not followed by a slash, such as http://localhost/timetest.asp/.
• The page code contains a typing mistake.

After successfully installing and testing the server software, create a root folder for your web application as described next.

Create a root folder for your application

You should create a root folder to store all the files of your web application. You should also make sure the folder has the necessary permissions.

1. Create a folder on the system running IIS and give it a name that's related to your application.

   Write down this folder name: you'll need it later when you define a Dreamweaver site.

   If IIS is running on your computer, a good place to create the folder is in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\, as in the following example:

   C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\MyWebApp

   By default, the IIS web server is set up to serve pages from the Inetpub\wwwroot folder. The web server will serve any page in this folder, or in any of its subfolders, in response to an HTTP request from a web browser.

2. Make sure the Read and Scripts permissions are enabled for the folder by doing the following:
   1. Start the IIS administrative tool (in Windows XP, select Start > Control Panel or Start > Settings > Control Panel, then double-click Administrative Tools, then double-click Internet Information Services).
   2. Expand the "local computer" list, followed by the Web Sites folder, and then the Default Web Site folder.
   3. Right-click your application folder and select Properties from the pop-up menu.
   4. In the Execute Permissions pop-up menu, make sure the Scripts Only option is selected. (For security reasons, do not select the Scripts and Executables option.)

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