Active Server Pages. Microsoft's web application scripting system, and one of the possible target for RSP.

A named set of database connection details. See the section called “Data Sources”

Java Server Pages. Sun's solution to web scripting on the Java platform.

The Hypertext Preprocessor. A web scripting language popular on Apache servers.

The request is the message sent to the web server by the user agent. The request will name a particular resource, in our context an RSP page, and the web server will respond by sending back a response from that resource.

The response of an RSP page is the output sent back to the user's browser (or other requesting agent). It consists of a set of HTTP headers and optionally some content, typically HTML.

A compiled language intended for writing portable web applications.

A user's state is the server-held data associated with that user. It will time out and be lost if the user does not keep sending requests quickly enough.

A string variable held as part of the user's session.

Sam Script is the name proposed for RSP by my friend Mike Colley. I politely declined to accept his suggestion.

The agent that sends the request. This is usually the user's web browser, but could equally well by a command line tool such as wget or some other program that uses HTTP to fetch web pages.