VBScript Programmer's Reference, Third Edition

Chapter 18. Remote Scripting

The remote scripting technology makes web applications substantially more powerful and more closely resemble client/server applications developed using languages like C++, Visual Basic, or Java. By doing this, programmers can overcome the inherent limitations of web applications. Without either using remote scripting or resorting to the newer (and popular) AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a web browser has only one way to request new information from the server—to load an entirely new page. With remote scripting, it becomes possible for the client page to execute a method on an ASP page without navigating away from the current page. More important, the requested data is available as the return value of the remote method called by the client page.

Combined with Dynamic HTML (DHTML), this technology greatly simplifies all the applications that were previously forced to use cookies, hidden HTML input fields, or other dirty tricks to rebuild the new page as similar as possible to the previous one.

This chapter shows you how to install remote scripting, enable it, and then leverage it with a few lines of code.

How Remote Scripting Works

Remote scripting is implemented as a library of functions that you call from a client-side script when you want to run a server method. When a server method is called, the request is routed to a proxy process that runs asynchronously in the browser (in the current implementation of remote scripting, the proxy is implemented ...