One of the things I like about CarPoint is that when you choose the make of car you're after from one list, all of the models for that make of car automatically appear in a list on the same page without any page refreshing. I was curious as to how NineMSN accomplished this, so I decided to investigate and delve into the world of remote scripting technologies.

Remote scripting is an extremely powerful feature available in both Netscape Navigator (4.x and above) and Internet Explorer (4.x and above). It allows us to use a combination of scripting languages to call server side ASP code from client side pages. Remote scripting treats our ASP pages as objects and allows us to use the object.method syntax to reference the functions contained within them.

In this article we're going to look at how to setup remote scripting on the client and server, as well as two cool examples that I've come up with in the last week to put remote scripting to good use.

You should have IIS installed on a Windows 98, NT, 2000 or XP web server as well as SQL Server 2000 and ADO version 2.5 or above installed. You should be familiar with JavaScript and ASP, and a bit of SQL knowledge wouldn't hurt either. By the end of this article you should have enough knowledge to implement your own version of the examples shown in this article.