What
is CGI? The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is
a standard for interfacing external applications with information
servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. A plain HTML document
that the Web daemon retrieves is static, which means it exists
in a constant state: a text file that doesn't change. A CGI
program, on the other hand, is executed in real-time, so that
it can output dynamic information.
For example, let's say that you wanted to "hook up"
your Unix database to the World Wide Web, to allow people
from all over the world to query it. Basically, you need to
create a CGI program that the Web daemon will execute to transmit
information to the database engine, and receive the results
back again and display them to the client. This is an example
of a gateway, and this is where CGI, currently version 1.1,
got its origins. |
