By Shishir Gundavaram
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) emerged as the first way to present dynamically generated information on the World Wide Web. CGI allows the computer to generate Web pages instantly at the user's request rather than being written by someone in advance. And at the time of this writing, it remains the only stable and well-understood method for creating such pages. Java presents problems that have not yet been solved. Other products are currently just in the announcement stage.
CGI is fun. You can get a kick out of writing scripts that perform tricks for you, and the users enjoy the spice the scripts add to your Web pages. But CGI has a serious side too: It lets the Internet offer the kind of interactive, user-driven applications that modern computer users have come to expect. CGI opens up an entire class of modern applications to the Web.
Today's computer users expect custom answers to particular questions. Gone are the days when people were satisfied by the computing center staff passing out a single, general report to all users. Instead, each salesperson, manager, and engineer wants to enter specific queries and get up-to-date responses. And if a single computer can do that, why not the Web?
This is the promise of CGI. You can display sales figures for particular products month by month, as requested by your staff, using beautiful pie charts or plots. You can let customers enter keywords in order to find information on your products. You can also offer day-to-day conveniences, like collecting comments from users, offering them searches through your archives, and letting them sign your guestbook.
CGI is fun. You can get a kick out of writing scripts that perform tricks for you, and the users enjoy the spice the scripts add to your Web pages. But CGI has a serious side too: It lets the Internet offer the kind of interactive, user-driven applications that modern computer users have come to expect. CGI opens up an entire class of modern applications to the Web.
Today's computer users expect custom answers to particular questions. Gone are the days when people were satisfied by the computing center staff passing out a single, general report to all users. Instead, each salesperson, manager, and engineer wants to enter specific queries and get up-to-date responses. And if a single computer can do that, why not the Web?
This is the promise of CGI. You can display sales figures for particular products month by month, as requested by your staff, using beautiful pie charts or plots. You can let customers enter keywords in order to find information on your products. You can also offer day-to-day conveniences, like collecting comments from users, offering them searches through your archives, and letting them sign your guestbook.