Building Your Own Win-Cgi Programs

by Bob Denny, Andrew Schulman, Ron Petrusha

CGI is the Common Gateway Interface, the "glue" between web servers and custom web-server applications. This book takes an in-depth look at the Windows CGI, or Win-CGI. Win-CGI lets you create a web interface between Windows-based applications, such as relational databases or spreadsheets, and Windows web servers like WebSite Professional and Microsoft IIS. Win-CGI programs can be written in a variety of languages, including Visual Basic, C++, C, and Perl. Co-written by Robert Denny, the inventor of Win-CGI, this book provides numerous examples and sample code for these languages both in the text and on the accompanying CD-ROM. Very broadly, you can use Win-CGI to accomplish these types of Produce dynamic, on-the-fly web pages in the user's browser. For example, you can write a Win-CGI program that validates user input and informs the user of missing or incomplete data; or one that provides the user with dynamic, up-to-the-minute information that can't be "hard-coded" into an HTML page. In fact, most of the Web's "active content" is produced not by Java, JavaScript, VBScript, or ActiveX, but by CGI, including Win-CGI. Handle back-end processing necessary to make a web application interactive. You can write Win-CGI programs to retrieve and process the information that users submit on HTML forms. Supply the interface between web browser and web server to a variety of non-web Windows resources, like databases or spreadsheets, or non-web Internet services, such as Archie. In its thorough coverage of using Win-CGI to develop web applications, the Introduces non-programmers to Win-CGI while emphasizing re-use of existing programs to save time and speedthe learning process Assesses Win-CGI's role in web application development in comparison to other available tools like scripting languages (JavaScript and VBScript) and server APIs (ISAPI, NSAPI, and WSAPI) Focuses on major development environments (including Visual Basic, C, Visual C++ with MFC, and Perl), which can be used to create Win-CGI applications, and includes code samples for each Covers advanced reading and writing of cookies, server push, and client pull Provides valuable techniques for debugging Win-CGI applications when using C, C++, and Visual Basic Discusses how to configure individual servers to execute Win-CGI applications

250 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 1997