Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Pros and Cons of CGI

There are advantages and disadvantages to writing your Web applications as CGI programs. In Hour 12, I’ll discuss some of the alternatives to CGI for Web application programming and how those alternatives compare to CGI. For now I’ll just talk about CGI. I’ll talk about the good stuff first—the advantages of CGI programming. The main advantage of CGI programming is that it’s the ultimate cross-platform technology. It works on Web servers running both Windows and UNIX, and with almost every Web server. So when you write CGI programs, you can be fairly certain that they’ll be portable to whatever environment you’ll want to run them in. The second major advantage of CGI is that it’s language independent. For the most part, ...