Forms are cool. We have all seen them while ordering books from Amazon.com or shopping for a new car. We'd like to use them on our web site, too, and we even have software that makes forms for us in HTML.
But the biggest problem with forms is that every form on the web must have an associated computer program or script to do its dirty work. There is no magic script that knows what all the text boxes and buttons in your form mean and what to do with the data you are trying to collect: if you create a form, someone must also write or otherwise provide a script to process your form.
Thus, you have two choices:
Most people choose option 2.
To facilitate writing your own computer program, the people who invented the World Wide Web also invented a special method for passing data from forms to these scripts. This method is called the Common Gateway Interface, or CGI. The special scripts associated with forms are often called CGI scripts.
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with Web browsers and Web servers. Unlike a static HTML page, a CGI program is executed on demand, so that it can output dynamic information. In particular, when you submit an HTML form, the server needs to have a CGI program which will take the information you submitted and properly process it.
For example, let's say that you wanted to "hook up" your UNIX database to the World Wide Web, to allow people from all over the world to query it. Basically, you need to create a CGI program (or script) that your web server will execute to transmit information from the client form to the database engine, receive the results back again, and display them to the client. This is an example of a gateway, and this is where CGI got its name.
Computing and Information Technology (CIT) makes several "canned" scripts available for UVM information providers. If you have suggestions for other CGIs to make part of the UVM service, please contact Wesley.Wright@uvm.edu.
Last modified August 31 2001 03:27 PM
