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CGI Programming Unleashed

By Eugene Eric Kim

The first things you should know about Common Gateway Interface (CGI) are what it is and why it is used. CGI is a standard whose specification defines a way for Web servers to communicate with external programs, and vice versa, so that the external program can generate HTML, images, or whatever, and have the server treat it the same as HTML, images, and so on not generated by an external program. The reason CGI is used is so you can generate dynamic content with the same ease that you generate static content. CGI is used because it is a very well defined and supported standard, and without CGI, dynamic content would have been impossible without proprietary server methods (now, there are alternatives to CGI that are becoming standard).

There are many useful applications of CGI programs. But, as with every other technology, CGI programs have their limits. Also, as with many other technologies, it is not always the best way to do things. For this reason, this chapter will go over what CGI programs can and cannot do, and what CGI based apps are good and bad for.

For comparison's sake, I use Java as the applet language.

What CGI Is Useful For
As stated earlier, CGI is useful for many different tasks. There are different reasons why it is the best method, or the only method, for a variety of tasks. This chapter examines the reasons, separating the tasks into three different levels. First, we cover simple tasks, which we will define as tasks that can be completed in a couple of hours and/or require almost no knowledge of how to program CGI apps/the CGI spec in general. This task level includes counters, among other things. Next, we cover intermediate tasks, which we will define as tasks that can be completed in a day or two and/or tasks that require a pretty good knowledge of how to program CGI apps/the CGI spec in general. This task level includes built from scratch imagemapping programs, apps that generate entire HTML pages, and apps that do animation, among other things. Finally, we cover advanced tasks, which we will define as tasks that take more than a day or two and/or require an expertise in CGI app programming/the CGI spec in general. This task level includes apps that include a home grown database engine, among other things.

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Special Edition Using CGI

By Jeffry Dwight and Michael Erwin

The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is one of the most useful tools in a Webmaster's kit. Whether you're the lone maintainer of a single home page on someone else's machine or the Webmaster of a huge domain, you'll find that CGI is essential for anything beyond presenting static text and graphics.

CGI is the magic behind Web-based interactive games, page counters, order-entry systems, online shopping carts, SQL database interfaces, animations, and clickable images. In fact, you'll find that CGI, in one of its many forms, is what brings the World Wide Web to life.

We assume throughout the book that you have at least an intermediate understanding of programming in one or more languages. This book won't teach you how to program, but it will teach you how to use your existing programming skills to make CGI scripts work.

We didn't shy away from complicated topics, but we made sure to cover the fundamentals, too. In all, if you're comfortable with C, Perl, Visual Basic, or AppleScript, you should be able to glean a great deal of information from these pages.

We explain the basics of CGI programming fairly well, so even if you've never thought of writing CGI before, you'll do fine. If you're already an accomplished CGI programmer, you'll find hundreds of tips and tricks throughout the book to expand your repertoire.

Where possible, we used pseudocode or a textual description of the process under discussion. We did this for a couple of reasons: First, this book is intended to be platform-independent, meaning that you should be able to profit from it no matter what server you run and no matter what programming environment you use. Second, a textual description forces the reader (and the author) to focus on the process rather than the syntax. The goal is for you to understand how the magic works, not just what to type.

You'll also find a lot of actual code, both in the pages of the book and on the accompanying CD-ROM. We assume that programmers, once they understand the concepts, will want to go forth and create programs. What better way than to be armed with working samples?

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CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

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.

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CGI Manual of Style Online

by Robert McDaniel

Welcome to the HTML version of the book CGI Manual of Style, by Robert McDaniel. To get started right away, use the link below to the Table of Contents. From this page you can link to any chapter as well as to the Quick Reference section. We've also included some script files from the book. Download CGIMOS.ZIP, this zip file contains a dozen or so scripts. Please use a utility that allows long file names when decompressing this file.

The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is a standard for communication between Web documents and CGI scripts you write. CGI scripting, or programming, is the act of creating a program that adheres to this standard of communication. A CGI script is simply a program that in some way communicates with your Web documents. Web documents are any kind of file used on the Web. They can be HTML documents, text files, image files, or any number of other file formats. The existence of this gateway between programs you write and your Web documents allows you to create much more dynamic and interactive Web pages than you could with HTML alone.

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CGI Developer's Guide

by Eugene Eric Kim

I wrote this book for the enthusiastic and the curious. You do not have to be an expert computer scientist or programmer to learn and master CGI programming. However, you must know at least one programming language and should have some basic programming experience. Your ability as a CGI programmer reduces to your ability as a programmer in general. After you learn the basic concepts and begin programming, you will rapidly gain the necessary knowledge and instincts to write effective applications.

Although the concepts in this book apply to any programming language, the examples are limited to C and Perl. C and Perl are two very popular CGI programming languages with different things to offer. It is useful to look at both C and Perl examples for similar tasks in order to understand some of the subtle distinctions between the different languages.

Most of the examples use the cgihtml library for C programs and cgi-lib.pl for Perl. My Perl examples are written in Perl 4. I chose not to use Perl 5 because proper Perl 5 programming requires some understanding of object-oriented programming and other advanced features. Instead of distracting you with the nuances of Perl 5, I decided to use Perl 4 examples (which are compatible with the Perl 5 interpreter). If you know and are familiar with Perl 5, I highly recommend you look at Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module, an excellent programming library for CGI applications. This and other libraries are included on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book.

Although knowing at least one programming language (preferably either C or Perl) is required, sometimes books like this are useful tools for learning how to program in a language. You should not use this book as a beginner's guide to C or Perl, but I hope your programming skills in either language are strengthened by going through the examples and applying some of the concepts on your own.

Finally, this book is centered largely around UNIX, although again, most of the concepts and code are portable to all platforms. I have tried to keep as many examples as possible fairly general so that they apply to all platforms. Some of the more advanced topics and examples required a focus on at least one platform. In these cases, my discussion is based on the UNIX environment. On other, rarer occasions, I also include more advanced information on both the Windows and Macintosh environments. I include some references to more information regarding these other platforms in the reference section at the end of this book.

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Writing World-Wide Web CGI Scripts in REXX

This talk is aimed at people who have experience with REXX and are interested in using it to write WWW CGI scripts. As part of this, I will describe several functions that are available in a library of REXX functions that simplify writing WWW CGI scripts. This library is freely available at //www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/www/tool/cgi-rexx/

Environment Variables

In uni-REXX the setting of an environment variable is returned by the GETENV(string) function, where string is the name of the environment variable whose setting is to be returned. The examples in this article make use of GETENV.

Other implementations of REXX, such as the OS/2 implementation, often use the REXX VALUE(name[,newvalue][,selector]) function (where the brackets ([]) indicate optional arguments). This can return the value of the variable named by name. The selector names an implementation-defined external collection of variables. If newvalue is supplied, then the named variable is assigned this new value.

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W3C httpd CGI/1.1 Script Support

Server scripts are used to handle searches, clickable images and forms, and to produce synthesized documents on the fly. See calendar and finger gateway for examples.

Setting Up httpd To Call Scripts

The server knows that a request is actually a script request by looking at the beginning of the URL pathname. You can specify these special strings in the configuration file (/etc/httpd.conf) by Exec rules:

Exec /url-prefix/* /physical-path/*

Where /url-prefix/ is the special string that signifies a script request, and /physical-path/ is the absolute filesystem pathname of the directory that contains your scripts.

Example

Exec /htbin/* /usr/etc/cgi-bin/*
makes URL paths starting with /htbin to be mapped to scripts in directory /usr/etc/cgi-bin.

I.e. requesting /htbin/myscript
causes a call to script

/usr/etc/cgi-bin/myscript

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Using Python for CGI programming

By Guido van Rossum

Overview

1 minute advocacy
30 minutes basic Python tutorial
30 minutes on Python CGI programming
30 minutes CGI case study: FAQ wizard
Spanish Inquisition

Python CGI programming Outline

HTML forms
Basic CGI usage
Setting up a debugging framework
Security
Handling persistent data
Locking
Sessions
Cookies
File upload
Generating HTML
Performance

CGI script structure

Check form fields
–use cgi.FieldStorage class to parse query
•takes care of decoding, handles GET and POST
•"foo=ab+cd%21ef&bar=spam" -->{'foo': 'ab cd!ef', 'bar': 'spam'} # (well, actually, ...)
Perform action
–this is up to you!
–database interfaces available
Generate HTTP + HTML output
–print statements are simplest
–template solutions available

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Common Gateway Interface in Python - An Interactive Instruction

Welcome! Python provides a portable, interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming (OOP) language ideal for Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Web programming. Furthermore, its pairing of significant power and clear syntax makes Python an excellent instructional tool. Language features include modules, classes, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing.

The objective of this site is twofold: introduce new Python programmers to the core language and provide new CGI programmers with a conceptual CGI knowledge base through the use of Python. This site best suits programmers with an intermediate level (two years or more) of object oriented C++ or Java programming experience.

What This Site Provides:

An introductory overview of the core Python language features (variables, control flow, and functions).
A review of more advanced language features (modules and classes).
An introduction to general CGI topics (HTML forms and script calls).
A tutorial on the Python CGI module features and Database Application Program Interface (DB-API).
Active code examples at nearly every level of instruction.

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Guide to Writing CGI Scripts in REXX and Perl

This Guide is aimed at people who wish to write their own WWW executable scripts using WWW's Common Gateway Interface ( CGI). Though the main emphasis is on REXX many examples are also provided in Perl.

There are some simple software libraries to facilitate writing CGI scripts. cgi-lib.rxx is a REXX library of functions (available at SLAC by using the REXX CALL PUTENV 'REXXPATH=/afs/slac/www/slac/www/tool/cgi-rexx'statement to include the library at execution time)and cgi-lib.pl is a similar library in Perl written by Steve Brenner (there is an executable copy of this libary at SLAC in /afs/slac/g/www/cgi-lib/cgi-lib.pl). NCSA has a very useful set of Perl CGI handler subroutines that are available via anonymous FTP.Another set of Perl CGI Server Side Scripts written by Brigitte Jellinek is available under Gnu public license. There is also the Source code for www.stanford.edu scripts and programs. There is also an index to Perl WWW programs gathered by Earl Hood. Finally see the Web Development Center.

Since there are security and other risks associated with executing user scripts in a WWW server, the reader may wish to first view a document providing information on a SLAC Security Wrapper for users' CGI scripts. Besides improving security, this wrapper also simplifies the task of writing a CGI script for a beginner.

Before embarking on writing a script, you may also want to check out some rough notes on SLAC Web Utilities Provided by CGI Scripts.

The CGI is an interface for running external programs, or gateways, under an information server. Currently, the supported information servers are HTTP (the Transport Protocol used by WWW) servers.

Gateway programs are executable programs (e.g. UNIX scripts) which can be run by themselves (but you wouldn't want to except for debugging purposes). They have been made executable to allow them to run under various (possibly very different) information servers interchangeably. Gateway programs conforming to this specification can be written in any language, including REXX or Perl, which produces an executable file

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CGI::Pretty - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code

By Brian Paulsen

CGI::Pretty is a module that derives from CGI. It's sole function is to allow users of CGI to output nicely formatted HTML code.

If a user were to create a table consisting of many rows and many columns, the resultant HTML code would be quite difficult to read since it has no carriage returns or indentation.

CGI::Pretty fixes this problem. What it does is add a carriage return and indentation to the HTML code so that one can easily read it.

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CGI::Fast - CGI Interface for Fast CGI

By Lincoln D. Stein

CGI::Fast is a subclass of the CGI object created by CGI.pm. It is specialized to work well with the Open Market FastCGI standard, which greatly speeds up CGI scripts by turning them into persistently running server processes. Scripts that perform time-consuming initialization processes, such as loading large modules or opening persistent database connections, will see large performance improvements.

WRITING FASTCGI PERL SCRIPTS
FastCGI scripts are persistent: one or more copies of the script are started up when the server initializes, and stay around until the server exits or they die a natural death. After performing whatever one-time initialization it needs, the script enters a loop waiting for incoming connections, processing the request, and waiting some more.

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CGI::Base - HTTP Daemon Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Base Class

By Tim Bunce

This module implements a CGI::Base object. This object represents the interface between the application and an HTTP deamon.

In a typical CGI scenario the interface is just a collection of environment variables. This module makes those variables available either via a $cgi->var() method or optionally as plain perl variables (see IMPORTING CGI VARIABLES below). Small scripts will tend to use the imported variables, larger scripts may prefer to use the var method.

By default the CGI::Base class will transparently deal with POST and PUT submissions by reading STDIN into $QUERY_STRING.

The CGI::Base module simplifies CGI debugging by providing logging methods (which redirect STDERR to a file) and a very handy test mode. The test mode automatically detects that the script is not being run by a HTTP server and requests test input from the user (or command line).

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CGI::Carp - CGI routines for writing to the HTTPD (or other) error log

By Lincoln D. Stein

CGI scripts have a nasty habit of leaving warning messages in the error logs that are neither time stamped nor fully identified. Tracking down the script that caused the error is a pain. This fixes that. Replace the usual

use Carp;

with

use CGI::Carp

And the standard warn(), die (), croak(), confess() and carp() calls will automagically be replaced with functions that write out nicely time-stamped messages to the HTTP server error log.
For example:

[Fri Nov 17 21:40:43 1995] test.pl: I'm confused at test.pl line 3.
[Fri Nov 17 21:40:43 1995] test.pl: Got an error message: Permission denied.
[Fri Nov 17 21:40:43 1995] test.pl: I'm dying.

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CGI - Simple Common Gateway Interface Class

By Lincoln D. Stein

This perl library uses perl5 objects to make it easy to create Web fill-out forms and parse their contents. This package defines CGI objects, entities that contain the values of the current query string and other state variables. Using a CGI object's methods, you can examine keywords and parameters passed to your script, and create forms whose initial values are taken from the current query (thereby preserving state information). The module provides shortcut functions that produce boilerplate HTML, reducing typing and coding errors. It also provides functionality for some of the more advanced features of CGI scripting, including support for file uploads, cookies, cascading style sheets, server push, and frames.

CGI.pm also provides a simple function-oriented programming style for those who don't need its object-oriented features.

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CGI Tutorial

By Nik Silver

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.

What CGI scripts are

Normally when a Web browser looks up a URL the following happens. First your computer contacts the HTTP server with the URL. The HTTP server looks at the filename requested by your computer and then sends that file back. Your computer then displays the file in the appropriate format.

However, it is possible to set up the HTTP server so that whenever a file in a certain directory is requested that file is not sent back; instead it is executed as a program, and whatever that program outputs is sent back for your computer to display. This function is called the Common Gateway Interface or CGI. The programs are called CGI scripts. The directory that the CGI scripts sit in cannot be specified by you alone - you need the help of whoever runs your HTTP server.

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CGI - Common Gateway Interface support for Python

A CGI script is invoked by an HTTP server, Most often, CGI scripts live in the server's special cgi-bin directory. The HTTP server places all sorts of information about the request (such as the client's hostname, the requested URL, the query string, and lots of other goodies) in the script's shell environment, executes the script, and sends the script's output back to the client.

The script's input is connected to the client too, and sometimes the form data is read this way; at other times the form data is passed via the ``query string'' part of the URL. This module is intended to take care of the different cases and provide a simpler interface to the Python script. It also provides a number of utilities that help in debugging scripts, and the latest addition is support for file uploads from a form (if your browser supports it).

The output of a CGI script should consist of two sections, separated by a blank line. The first section contains a number of headers, telling the client what kind of data is following...

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The Common Gateway Interface

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.

The database example is a simple idea, but most of the time rather difficult to implement. There really is no limit as to what you can hook up to the Web. The only thing you need to remember is that whatever your CGI program does, it should not take too long to process. Otherwise, the user will just be staring at their browser waiting for something to happen.

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CGI programming in Perl

This is a tutorial about how to run Perl CGI scripts with the Apache server on Win95/98. Remember our purpose is to install and configure these so the Windows environment mimics that of the Unix/Linux host computer, which is where your web pages are hosted; this way we won't have to re-edit scripts when we upload them.

This page deals with CGI programming in Perl. If you don't know Perl, you would be best to go to the tutorial on this site, or find another tutorial, so you know the basics of Perl programming.

In order to run scripts you will need a web server running on your computer. The following information explains how to configure a web server and Perl on a Win32 computer in order to run CGI scripts. If you want information on setting up the same things on Unix/Linux there is a lot of information on the web, so I haven't written my own page about it.

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Free CGI, Javascript, XML, CSS, HTML, DHTML Ebooks & Reviews

Download free javascript, xml, css, html ebooks

CGI Programming Unleashed

Special Edition Using CGI

CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

CGI Manual of Style Online

CGI Developer's Guide

Writing World-Wide Web CGI Scripts in REXX

W3C httpd CGI/1.1 Script Support

Using Python for CGI programming

Common Gateway Interface in Python - An Interactive Instruction

Guide to Writing CGI Scripts in REXX and Perl

CGI::Pretty - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code

CGI::Fast - CGI Interface for Fast CGI

CGI::Base - HTTP Daemon Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Base Class

CGI::Carp - CGI routines for writing to the HTTPD (or other) error log

CGI - Simple Common Gateway Interface Class

CGI Tutorial

CGI - Common Gateway Interface support for Python

The Common Gateway Interface

CGI programming in Perl

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