Active Server Pages technology generates HTML and passes the dynamically created HTML to the browser to be displayed to the user. Microsoft created Active Server Pages to make it easier for developers to create dynamic Web sites in a Windows environment.

Further Reading

http://course.cengage.com/careers/glossary/programming.cfm#cgi

ColdFusion is a product created by Allaire Corporation of Cambridge, Mass. that includes a server and a development toolset designed to integrate databases and Web pages. With ColdFusion, a user could enter a zip code on a Web page, and the server would query a database for information on the nearest movie theaters and present the results in HTML form. ColdFusion Web pages include tags written in ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) that simplify integration with databases and avoid the use of more complex languages like C++ to create translating programs.

A Common Gateway Interface Script (CGI Script) is a small program written in a language such as Perl, Tcl, C or C++, it functions as the glue between HTML pages and other programs on a web server.

For example, a CGI script would allow search data entered on a Web page to be sent to the DBMS (database management system) for lookup. It would also format the results of that search as an HTML page and send it back to the user. The CGI script resides in the server and obtains the data from the user via environment variables that the Web server makes available to it.