Understanding Web Services

[Jonathan Wood]

I'm looking into implementing Web services to provide product activation
codes to resellers. This seems to be going fine.

One large reseller tells me they support CGI for this purpose, as thought
it's the same as Web services. Clearly, CGI is not the same as a Web
service, but reading about it, it seems similar in that it somehow calls
code running on my server.

Can anyone clarify for me the primary differences between CGI and Web
services? Specifically, can a CGI interface be implemented using ASP.NET, or
could a Web service be made to work by code that calls CGI?

Thanks!

Jonathan

 

[d_wzrdv_z]

Microsoft ISAPI Technologies
Microsoft introduced another Web server interface with their Web server, Internet Information Server. This is the Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI), and differs from the CGI in that it allows compiled code within a dynamic link library (DLL) to be executed directly by the Web server. As with the CGI, the code can access all the information in the client request, and it generates the entire output for the returned page.

Most developments in Microsoft's Web arena have been based on the ISAPI interface. One early and short-lived product was dbWeb, a data access technology that provided a range of searching, filtering and formatting capabilities for accessing data stored on the server, and for interacting with the client.

A second development was the Internet Database Connector (IDC). This proved a big hit with developers – not only because it was fast and efficient (unlike dbWeb), but also because it was a lot more generic and easier to program. IDC introduced the concept of templates, allowing programmers to easily adapt existing HTML pages to use its features and quickly build new applications around it.

 

[bruce barker]

cgi is method for a url to specify a program to run, either a binary or
a scripting language like perl, ruby or python. a cgi program can call a
webservice or act as a webservice, just depends on how its coded. often
cgi programs expect a xml post and return xml, sometimes they do form
post, just depends.

 

[Jonathan Wood]

Thanks, can you tell me what, if any, support ASP.NET has to implement a CGI
interface?

Thanks.