CGI Programming

CGI programming can use a variety of programming languages. Perl is popular, but we shall be using C, due to its familiarity, speed, and tool support (e.g. text search, file manipulation).

CGI is a server-side mechanism: a program is invoked on the server via a request from the client's browser. This request is often created from a HTML form, whose details become the input to the server application. The output of the server program is sent back to the client. The output is usually a HTML document, but it need not be.

CGI Programming is done in three stages:

  1. Write the HTML form.
  2. Write the application which interprets the form data.
  3. Design the document returned (i.e. the output of the application).

[GIF]

All of this is explained in the "Interactive Forms in HTML" article, which you should READ.

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