Posted on: October 09, 2009
CGI (The Common Gateway Interface) refers to a standard protocol which is used as a medium or interface between application software and the information server (usually a web server).The task of an information server or web server is to provide appropriate output depending on the request made by the client web browsers. If the client browser requests the content of a file, then content is returned and if a command has to be executed, then the output from the command is returned. A CGI script written in Perl /Java can be used to build a CGI website or web pages easily. Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a scripting language that is used for system management tasks, scanning information from the text files, extracting information from these files and printing reports from these text files. The language is not tiny, but simple to use and practical. The main use of Perl is to build a CGI website, since it is used as a CGI language for web development. It is the programming language for Windows and UNIX and it can also be used to create graphical user interface with Tk. Tk is an open source platform independent widget tool kit used for creating Graphical user interfaces. Perl is advantageous than C++ in some cases due to its simplicity and ease of use. A thousand lines of code (1000 LOC) in C++ can be written in just 100 lines of code. Most of the Hosting providers support CGI and it is cost effective. Since, basic CGI support is very cheap and you can easily find a host, building a CGI website using Perl is a good thing to do. CGI scripts allow web developer to pass on the dynamic information in the form of HTML file to the client.CGI program can be written in any language like java and will be executed by the server. This technology is usually used to add database-query engines, search engines, interactive user forums and many such applications. Once you understand the basics , you can start writing your own gateways!
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