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When a CGI Script is the Most Elegant Solution
An anonymous reader writes "Writing local Web applications can be quick, easy, and efficient for solving specific Intranet problems. Learn why a Web browser is sometimes a better interface than a GUI application and why experienced Web developers find themselves struggling to learn a GUI toolkit, and descover that a simple CGI script would serve their needs perfectly well, if not better."
things like Java Web Start or .NET's ClickOnce solve the distribution issue. The advantages of the web are more lightweight UIs, easier to distribute to -third partys-, and better cross platform compatibility (even compared to Java). Easier update and maintenance, not so much.
Im working for an (extremely large) company that decided on web apps for the deployement thing alone, without needing (or -wanting-) any of the other advantages. So we have slow, bloated, IE6-only web apps. Hey, its easy to deploy. Has the users cursing non-stop and wanting us dead. But its easy to deploy!
I'm gonna have to agree with Opera on this one. onunload is the source of annoying pages and advertisements that can only be closed by killing your browser process.
"But which bits of java script are fancy and which are not?"
This is actually quite easy. Stuff that relates to the DOM often differ from browser to browser while the core language does not. This is somewhat similar to the fact that you can compile and link ANSI-compliant C on virtually any platform as long as you don't do anything platform specific.
At work I recently developed a JavaScript framework for calculating text length that had to take variable character widths and hyphenation into account. The idea is that the user can type away in a standard TEXTAREA field and know when some predefined text area in a PDF document is full. I think the code ended up as 500+ lines of JavaScript code, but the ONLY browser specific problem I ran into was a subtle difference in the parsing of arrays; Firefox would treat the statement [1,2,3,4,] as an array with the length of 4, while Internet Explorer would say the length was instead 5 (and the last value was "undefined", if I recall). I gather that the reason why browser independence came so painlessly was that 95% of the code was just text processing and number crunching anyway. I doubt I'd have the same luck if I tried to do a WYSIWYG editor since it would have a great more interaction with the DOM.
As another user stated, CGI is a specification. One that PHP uses if it's compiled as a CGI binary or emulates if it's installed as a web server module. $_SERVER, for instance, is populated mostly with CGI Environment variables. $_GET is a processed version of the CGI QUERY_STRING variable. $_COOKIE is a processed version of the the CGI $COOKIE (and possibly $COOKIE2) variables. The $_FILES array is filled with the parts of a multipart/form-data input that have a filename= section. This comes from a POSTed form (which uses STDIN as per the HTML and CGI specs).
Need I go on?
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