Are there e-commerce libraries for C / CGI?

[Michael]

If I decide to do my server side work using C and CGI is there a set
of C libraries comparable to PHP? I'm going to need to do e-commerce
among other things, and am concerned that there may not be much
available for C.

 

[Seebs]

If I decide to do my server side work using C and CGI is there a set
of C libraries comparable to PHP? I'm going to need to do e-commerce
among other things, and am concerned that there may not be much
available for C.

There are probably some packages for this sort of thing, but I would
guess that very, very, few of them are for C. There's healthy ecosystems
for this kind of thing for PHP, Python, C, and Ruby. I've heard of people
doing a very good job of it in Lisp. C... Not my first choice for such
work.

FWIW, if I have any choice about how to do such a thing, my tool of choice
for it these days is Ruby on Rails.

-s

 

[Edwin van den Oetelaar]

If I decide to do my server side work using C and CGI is there a set
of C libraries comparable to PHP? I'm going to need to do e-commerce
among other things, and am concerned that there may not be much
available for C.

A couple of years ago I used : http://www.boutell.com/cgic/
I combined it with a LEX and YACC parser to parse the templates.
Would I do it again...
Think not.
I rebuild it later in a scripting language. The reason I did it in 'C' was that I needed the CGI to
handle some hardware directly, and to obfuscate how I did it.

Why use 'C' for this, are you running in a 64KByte environment?
Just my $0.02
regards, Edwin

 

[Nick]

If I decide to do my server side work using C and CGI is there a set
of C libraries comparable to PHP? I'm going to need to do e-commerce
among other things, and am concerned that there may not be much
available for C.

No, but I've got a scripting language written in C with SQLite and
ClearSilver templating built in that works well for CGI. The link below
shows what it can do.

ClearSilver in particular makes reading CGI and writing HTML pretty easy.

I did it because I wanted to really tightly integrate some heft
processing (shortest path work) on smaller and slower computers than are
around today (for people like us, anyway). These day's I'd use a
pre-existing language that let me integrate C directly into it I think.

Why on earth do you want to do this rather than use some suitable
language (not necessarily PHP)?