Re: Common Gateway Interface

At 5:24 PM -0400 5/29/97, Hallam-Baker wrote:
>> Why is there absolutely no mention of the CGI interaction between the HTTP 
>> daemon and the CGI programs? Surely this standard should specify which peices> the header are made available to CGI programs and how they are made available
>
>
>Because CGI is not an IETF spec, it was a hack put together by Ari
>Luotenen of CERN and Rob McCool at NCSA to allow people to plug
>stuff into both their servers. While their Netscape server supports
>CGI the prefered way to plug in a module is via NSAPI which is 
>much more efficient because it does not spawn a process for each
>transaction.
>
>CGI is completely inappropriate to standardize in the IETF. It is
>operating system specific and its an API and not a protocol. The
>W3C might have an interest in producing a spec but I would not
>count on it. It might be nice to have a document readily available 
>with Ari and Rob's names on it but it really isn't a technology
>that should be considered leading edge at this point. NSAPI and 
>ISAPI have replaced it, there are many, many such APIs and there
>is no particular reason to consider CGI as a special case even
>if popular Web books have "CGI" on the cover in letters three 
>inch high.

Actually, the Java server API or the earlier, and more general, the cl-http API are cleverer than
the ns or ms APIs