VBScript in Web Development

Using VBScript within your Web pages enables you to create a very dynamic and interactive experience for the Web surfers who visit your site.

It is true whether you have a site that is visible to the entire Internet or an intranet site visible only to users of your company's LAN or WAN.

Visual Basic is an inherently graphical programming language. The way most information is retrieved and processed by the user is through graphical user interface (GUI) objects that you create for your user.

Once the GUI is in place, the user causes the functions and procedures within your program initiated through keystrokes or mouse clicks.

Writing programs in a high-level language such as Visual Basic is much more like writing instructions in plain English. The conceptual buffer between a language that is close to the chip and a higher-level language is called abstraction.

You know more about what's going on when you read an assembly language program, but you could do it in Basic and not have to worry about moving blocks of memory around yourself.

VBScript programs will begin with a <SCRIPT> tag and end with a </Script> tag. Your procedures and Functions would work the same way.

The procedure created, ended and your program code goes in between.

The first thing you'll notice in the VBScript code block is the

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBS"> line.

Keep in mind that you must close out your script code block with a tag.

If you do not add this tag, your script usually won't run, and you would not know what's going on because you are not going to see any error messages. Errors like this are tough to track down because if your code block is large, you might start hacking away at the perfectly good code to see if you can figure out what's wrong. An error like this can waste much time because nothing you try works.

Variables in VBScript

All variables in VBScript are of the type variant. A variant is a variable that is simply the name for a piece of data. A variant is a variable that is simply the name for a piece of data.

The variant type does not differentiate between types of data until the time comes to process that data. It means that a variable can represent literally any value or type of value.

Procedures in VBScript

A program is made up of one or more procedures. A procedure is an instruction block in VBScript.

Regular procedures, or Subs, simply act on data, but a special procedure called a Function returns a value to the procedure that called it. Be aware that all your scripts would be made up of procedures and Function blocks.