Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Scripts

Common gateway interface (CGI) is the first technology that has been created to enable interactivity on the World Wide Web. Despite its relative age and a number of competing technologies, CGI remains a viable tool for creating dynamic Web pages. This chapter introduces CGI technology from a historic perspective. Further, this chapter examines the architecture of a CGI script and illustrates it with several examples written in Perl. The chapter concludes with an overview of different applications of CGI scripts and future prospects of this technology. Keywords: active server pages; application programming interface (API); CGI script; dynamic web pages; Perl