CGI for Not Yet Techies

Computer Careers: High Tech Jobs Profit with Interactive Web Pages -- Gateway to the Internet

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is not actually a program for computer careers itself, CGI is a standardized process for connecting web sites, which are operating on a visitor’s browser, to programs that are on the web site’s server.

The purpose of CGI is to make the site more interactive in some way.

Say you go to a web site and fill out an order form to buy their widget. After you hit the Submit button, all the information you put in the form fields was sent via CGI to the web server, which has some program to process it in some way.

If you have ever input something to a web site and seen a huge long line of numbers and characters flash across the small screen of your browser that usually shows the URL of the page where you’re at, your information was being sent to web server via CGI Common Gateway Interface. It looks something like:

7ghtt%hp#+788#%.cgi-bin

That last part, "cgi-bin" is important.

That defines the place on the web server where it stores and processes CGI Common Gateway Interface programs. It’s important to the web server to keep Common Gateway Interface programs all in one place. It doesn’t want them running around its entire hard drive, so it keeps them confined to their own "bin."

These programs can also be instructed send back HTML pages in response to the input. For example, a page reading, "Thanks for your order." If the web site owner is smart, he’ll make sure the program knows your name and says, "Thanks for your order, Howard" (or whatever you input).

This is the quickest and best way to keep a hit counter, for those of you who want to show off how many people have visited your site. Me, I’m more modest. I want you to think I’m treating you as though you’re my only guest.

Common Gateway Interface -- CGI -- is also useful for computer jobs in Database Backending, Search Engines and Multiple Dynamic Pages

It is really just the connection between the web page, the data you input which is being sent to the server, and the program running on the server itself.

The program on the server might be in C, C++ or Perl. Perl is now probably the most common. It’s been called the duct tape of the Internet, by those with computer careers.

CGI is also needed for chat rooms on web sites and for almost anything interactive.

One advantage is that it has been around longer than its possible alternatives (such as Java, JavaScript and VBScript) and so there are a lot of useful and proven scripts available.

CGI is especially important because these programs are a security risk to web servers. There are people in this world who seem to have nothing better to do with their lives than try to use their computer knowledge to destroy. They know how to input data into web site forms which can actually cause the web server to crash, if this data is not carefully screened and checked before it’s processed.

Therefore, web hosts may not let you use any such programs at all.

Or may insist you use only their programs, which they know are safe. This can limit you, but it is a legitimate security concern on their part.

There are folks who speculate that CGI Common Gateway Interface will eventually be taken over Java and/or JavaScript (which can do many of the same things) but until that happens, if you want to produce web sites that are interactive, learning CGI will help you a lot in your computer career.

Next: PERL

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