about CGI

[joker]

I don't know Perl to build a CGI script but I know C++. I need to
know how the server use a "file.exe" and the html page from the client
browser. In C++ the data I need to consider is stored in arrays or
variables. The html page inside the server how is stored? How a
CGI .exe can find that data?

 

[J.O. Aho]

I don't know Perl to build a CGI script but I know C++. I need to
know how the server use a "file.exe" and the html page from the client
browser. In C++ the data I need to consider is stored in arrays or
variables. The html page inside the server how is stored? How a
CGI .exe can find that data?

You will have a cgi directory on your server (you may to configure that
yourself), this is where you place cgi scripts and binaries.

The cgi has to generate the data that is sent to the user, this includes even
the mime type header (if you forget this, your cgi will not work).

If I remember it right (it's like 7 years ago), the incoming data is read from
the $arg array in main(). Data you store within the program is all up to you.

Here is a good place for you start looking for more information:
http://www.google.com/search?q=write+cgi+c++&sa=Google+Search&filter=0

 

[Sherm Pendley]

I don't know Perl to build a CGI script but I know C++.

That's OK - CGI is just an interface between the web server and a child
process. It concerns specific environment variables, and what kind of data
the child process must understand and produce on its standard input and
output streams.

Perl is popular for this purpose because of its robust string handling,
which makes it a good fit for working with the text-based data formats that
are very common on the web. But the CGI spec itself is language-agnostic.
Any language, whether compiled or interpreted, can be used to write a CGI.

I need to
know how the server use a "file.exe" and the html page from the client
browser. In C++ the data I need to consider is stored in arrays or
variables. The html page inside the server how is stored? How a
CGI .exe can find that data?

It doesn't even need to be an HTML page. A CGI can produce any type of output
using any means the author wants, whether that is reading HTML from a file
and print it, or generating a graph and returning it as GIF image data.

You can find links to information regarding the CGI "standard" - a de facto
standard, which hasn't been formalized as an RFC - at the W3C site:

<http://www.w3.org/CGI/>

One popular library of CGI functions is LibCGI. It's plain C functions, not
C++ classes, but they're callable from C++:

<http://libcgi.sourceforge.net/>

sherm--