7.1. Introduction

Thus far we have dealt only with static web pages, which are simply HTML text files that don’t change except when the file is edited by hand or generated by WML. In this chapter, we learn about dynamic web pages, which contain content that is created when requested. Now all the Perl that you learned in Chapter 4 and the MySQL that you learned in Chapter 5 will come in handy.

In this chapter, we discuss the basic way to create dynamic web pages: the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard for communication between a client and the server. CGI scripts can be written in almost any language; we like Perl. Perl is well suited to the types of text processing common for many tasks, such as search engines and forms interfaces. Other ...

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