In the comparison section 15 Seconds has compared component products that have similar features. Several companies and individuals have produced COM objects with similar functionality and varying price ranges. To efficiently choose a product that meets your development requirements 15 Seconds has broken down the products by feature and compared them side by side.
Several components support the ability to detect which browser is requesting the page. Commonly this can be used to return different pages based on the abilities of the browser. The components work of the User Agent string passed with the browser request as part of the HTTP protocol.
When IIS 3.0 was released and Active Server Pages introduced the initial set of components that represented the FileSystemObject was able to read a text file from the hard drive, but had no file manipulation functionality. Because of the opportunity to easily create a file manipulation object to fill the needs of Active Server programmers many of these objects were developed. With the release of IIS 4.0 and the new FileSystemObject, which makes up for the lack of functionality of the original, many of the component authors will be hard pressed to sell their objects. However these objects, do exist for people unwilling to upgrade to IIS 4.0 and are compared here feature by feature.
RFC 1867 specifies a format for submitting files from a browser to a web server. Third party objects are available that transfer submitted files to disk or database. This chart compares the COM objects that handle files submitted to the server.
There are several components on the market, which have a COM interface to the NT Administration database. These components allow you to manipulate NT users, and their attributes, from Active Server pages. They can be useful when doing real time access to restricted areas within a web site, or for remote administration.
With the first release of Active Server pages came a built in object called Session which maintained Session State across pages. This gave a great advantage to Active Server Page programmers since they now had a cookie-issuing object that allowed them to store information about a particular user for the whole visit of the site.
However, the Session object that was provided by Microsoft was lacking in scope and could not span an entire web farm. For this reason third party Session object came on the scene to allow web developers additional functionality.
