Observing the User Experience: A Practitioners Guide to User Research

The ATL Server library is designed for developers who need the high performance, control, and flexibility of ISAPI. It isnt designed to simplify your task by hiding the underlying technology; its designed to simplify your task by providing a lot of code that you need to create a fully functional Web applicationcode you would otherwise have to write yourself.

ATL Server is a C++ library designed by and for C++ developers who need to create Web applications and Web services with the low-level control, flexibility, and performance that ISAPI provides. It is an unmanaged C++ library; it doesnt involve the .NET runtime in any way.

ATL Server isnt designed to provide a high level of abstraction. Its a layer of thin wrappers over ISAPI, and it doesnt hide or simplify the underlying technology; instead, it makes using this underlying technology more productive. Theres no scripting language or abstracted object model here (although you could easily implement features like this on top of ATL Server).