Advantages of CGI

Most often, dynamic documents are completely dynamic, at least from the server's perspective. That is, they are generated entirely by an outside program executed by the server. In essence, the outside program receives any user input associated with the document as its standard input, and outputs the generated document to standard output, along with important type information identifying the nature of the document.

A standard has emerged for the construction of such completely dynamic documents by external programs installed on the server system. That standard is the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and it regulates the environment in which such programs will execute.

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface to the Web server that enables you to extend the web server's functionality. Using CGI, you can interact with users who access your site. It is the manner of communication that a server employs to send useful information back and forth between your browser and a computer program on a web server.

CGI communication is handled over the standard input and output, which means that if you know how to print and read data using your programming language, you can write a Web server application. Other than parsing the input and output, programming CGI applications is almost equivalent to programming any other application.

A CGI program can take advantage of any resource available to its output. It can also accept input from the user by accepting the contents of a form filled out by the user. These two basic capabilities have led to a wide variety of applications.

(Eg. , registration, on the fly HTML creation etc.,)

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