the university of texas at austin
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE

CGI

CGI, the Common Gateway Interface, allows Web pages to be generated "on the fly", at the user's request, instead of writing them in advance. Examples: our Directory page is generated by a PERL program that reads the directory file, finds the .htm or .html files in each directory, and creates a page that is sent to the browser.

You can also build interfaces to search databases or index files (also called gateway applications, or write scripts to gather information entered by users (forms processing.)

CGI programs can be written in C or C++, VisualBasic, PERL, or other computer languages. PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is the most used language for CGIs, because it is very powerful and relatively easy to learn. See, for example, the Teach Yourself CGI Programming with Perl in a Week page.

Week 3 page