CGI Programming/Coding

[Dr. House, M.D.]

Has anyone ever tried it? Is it even worth getting in to (yes, I know proboards uses it, which is why this question was brought up)? I do see how powerful it is and everything, but getting started to use it... is a different story.

[Bennett 🚀]

I've wondered this also. Doesn't it do the same thing as PHP and ASP?/form processors?

[Dr. House, M.D.]

By the way it looks, I'm going to say yes about that. I know you can use it with MySQL/PostgreSQL

[Bob]

Okay let the fun begin.

CGI is not a language. You do not write code in CGI.

CGI, or Common Gateway Interface, is a standard. It allows the web server to communicate with the client. More specifically, it states how the web server can have another application on the machine create the web page request.

Now CGI in and of itself is rather inefficient. Thus it's not commonly used. Rather Apache modules are more popular (think mod_perl, mod_php, mod_python, etc.). Where a module doesn't exist FastCGI tends to be utilized. CGI's problem is that it's resource intensive (each call starts a new process). Apache modules eliminate that issue entirely. FastCGI improves on it by allowing one process to handle multiple requests.

That said, you're referring to Perl (which is a language). Perl is still a very popular language but it has lost much of its former grip on web development in favor of Java (J2EE especially) and PHP. It's still arguably the most popular language amongst sysadmins. Whether it's worth getting into or not is a tough question. On one side it's impossible to answer because it's a choice you have to make on your own. And on the other side it's a question that is akin to choosing a religion... debating it isn't pretty.

Look at the introductory material covering Perl. See how you like it. If you have a positive reaction to it then stick with it.

[Dr. House, M.D.]

I do like it and everything (also a lot of people know it by CGI over Perl a lot better )

I have noticed, it is server intensive. So, Bobby, is there a way to reduce the load on the server (why does it always have to call back to the server x.x)?