Monday, December 8, 2008

What is CGI?

"CGI" stands for "Common Gateway Interface." CGI is one method by which a web server can obtain data from (or send data to) databases, documents, and other programs, and present that data to viewers via the web. More simply, a CGI is a program intended to be run on the web. A CGI program can be written in any programming language, but Perl is one of the most popular, and for this book, Perl is the language we'll be using.

CGI is the Common Gateway Interface which allows you to create Web pages on the fly based on information from buttons, checkboxes, text input and so on. The pages can be images, sounds, text and indeed everything else transferable by the Web. They can even be references to other Web pages. In this tutorial we concentrate on creating HTML documents (rather than images and sounds) but the principles transfer readily to other formats. This should provide a good start to cope with the more comprehensive documentation elsewhere. For example, you should be able to find your way around the CGI programmer's reference with greater purpose, and perhaps some of the CGI material on Yahoo.

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