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CGI a Definition

What is CGI?

Common Gateway Interface is the process by which a webserver gets data from (or sends to) a database, document or other program, and presents that information to viewers on the internet. It is used to create a website with interactive features. CGI can be written in any programming language but Perl and PHP are the most common. Of the 2, PHP is the easiest to use with MySQL for handling relational databases.

What is a CGI script?

CGI scripts are like small programs written in a desired coding language. The scripts are sent to an interpreter located on the host server where thay are processed for execution by the browser. All scripts must follow CGI protocol.

What do you need to write CGI scripts?

CGI scripts can be written with any text based editor, like notepad or word pad for Windows. There are, however: many editors built which are cross platform and can be used for CGI Scripting.

What can CGI do?

Search a site, registration, on-line purchasing, credit card validation, chart presentations, counters. Although other applications have been developed in the last few years, Perl/CGI and PHP remain the easiest to learn and therefore the most popular.

Why use Perl?

Perl was created in 1986 by Larry Wall to create reports for a tech company where he was working. Because it was presented as open source, others have added to its capabilities and produced a powerful, full featured programming language that can be used for many purposes.

Perl is particulary suited to Web related tasks. It is a powerful text manipulation tool. It is easily ported from one platform to another. Scripts written for Unix can be easily adapted to Windows or Apple platforms.

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What about PHP?

Until recently our choice for simple form processing was Perl. Today we recommend PHP for simple forms that don't require file i/o operations. PHP coding is similar to Perl, but a lot less verbose. In fact, a lot of code you may have already written in Perl can be easily modified to PHP. The beauty of PHP is that it can be embedded right into your HTML code. PHP is also a very portable choice.

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