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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."
I hope you're wearing shoes in the winter these days. :P
Fram, fram, and all that...
I mean seriously, descover? Aren't the editors paid around here?
WTF is up with all the IBM Developer Works for dummies articles recently?
Many of us have probably found useful stuff there in the past but the recent articles are just useless - even for beginners.
Discover correct spelling!
Erm why use a script, there are plenty of text parsing code around in C++, or it's trivial to write your own and you can do a lot more in C++ than PERL.
I wrote a whole search engine with nothing but C++, the GCC compiler and a CGI wrapper on Apache. It was a doddle!
For those of you who don't know, a CGI in Apache (minus any special persistence) is a simple executable that receives it's input in stdin stream as formatted text, and writes it's HTML (or JPEG or whatever) result to stdout. When writing the output, it appends a few extra lines at the start to tell Apache if the result is HTML, JPEG, text or a page redirect or whatever.