 | CGI Programming with Perl |  |
Like the rest of the Internet, the Common Gateway Interface , or CGI, has come a very long way in a very short time. Just a handful of years ago, CGI scripts were more of a novelty than practical; they were associated with hit counters and guestbooks, and were written largely by hobbyists. Today, CGI scripts, written by professional web developers, provide the logic to power much of the vast structure the Internet has become.
Despite the attention it now receives, the Internet is not new. In fact, the precursor to today's Internet began thirty years ago. The Internet began its existence as the ARPAnet, which was funded by the United States Department of Defense to study networking. The Internet grew gradually during its first 25 years, and then suddenly blossomed.
The Internet has always contained a variety of protocols for exchanging information, but when web browsers such as NCSA Mosaic and, later, Netscape Navigator appeared, they spurred an explosive growth. In the last six years, the number of web hosts alone has grown from under a thousand to more than ten million. Now, when people hear the term Internet, most think of the Web. Other protocols, such as those for email, FTP, chat, and news, certainly remain popular, but they have become secondary to the Web, as more people are using web sites as their gateway to access these other services.
The Web was by no means the first technology available for publishing and exchanging information, but there was something different about the Web that prompted its explosive growth. We'd love to tell you that CGI was the sole factor for the Web's early growth over protocols like FTP and Gopher. But that wouldn't be true. Probably the real reason the Web gained popularity initially was because it came with pictures. The Web was designed to present multiple forms of media: browsers supported inlined images almost from the start, and HTML supported rudimentary layout control that made information easier to present and read. This control continued to increase as Netscape added support for new extensions to HTML with each successive release of the browser.
Thus initially, the Web grew into a collection of personal home pages and assorted web sites containing a variety of miscellaneous information. However, no one really knew what to do with it, especially businesses. In 1995, a common refrain in corporations was "Sure the Internet is great, but how many people have actually made money online?" How quickly things change.
Today, e-commerce has taken off and dot-com startups are appearing everywhere. Several technologies have been fundamental to this progress, and CGI is certainly one of the most important. CGI allows the Web to do things, to be more than a collection of static resources. A static resource is something that does not change from request to request, such as an HTML file or a graphic. A dynamic resource is one that contains information that may vary with each request, depending on any number of conditions including a changing data source (like a database), the identity of the user, or input from the user. By supporting dynamic content, CGI allows web servers to provide online applications that users from around the world on various platforms can all access via a standard client: a web browser.
It is difficult to enumerate all that CGI can do, because it does so much. If you perform a search on a web site, a CGI application is probably processing your information. If you fill out a registration form on the Web, a CGI application is probably processing your information. If you make an online purchase, a CGI application is probably validating your credit card and logging the transaction. If you view a chart online that dynamically displays information graphically, chances are that a CGI application created that chart. Of course, over the last few years other technologies have appeared to handle dynamic tasks like these; we'll look at some of those in a moment. However, CGI remains the most popular way to do these tasks and more.
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| 0.7. Acknowledgments from the First Edition |  | 1.2. Introduction to CGI |
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