Merging content and application
Example: Combining two CGI services
<form method="GET" action="http://www.netmind.com/cgi-bin/uncgi/url-mind">
Enter your email address to receive email if Rainer Poertner posts
anything new on Usenet:
<input type=text size=40 name="required-email">
<input type=hidden value="http://dejanews.dejanews.com/cgi-bin/dnauthor-profile.tcl?author=72143.2726@compuserve.com%20(Rainer%20Poertner)" name=url>
<input type=submit value="Register">
</form>
While it's amusing to know you'll receive email if Rainer posts again,
my real purpose here was to demonstrate one of the cool things that are
possible because of the web's Common Gateway Interface (CGI). In this
case, I've combined DejaNews (CGI method=GET access to a .tcl script
running under
Apache/1.0.3) with the NetMind URL-minder (CGI method=POST
to a machine running
NCSA/1.5). This is distributed computation, folks! And it's
available today, using utterly simple tools: I suspect that most of what
developers think they need ActiveX or DCOM or even Java for, they could
be doing with some silly CGI script (server) and an HTML form (client).
By the way, notice that Apache/1.0.3 thing above.
This is a link to a
service that will tell you what web server a particular site is running. The
URL looks like this:
<A HREF="http://www.netcraft.co.uk/cgi-bin/Survey/whats?host=dejanews.dejanews.com&port=80">.
It's just a standard hypertext link, but it's not to a static
document; it's a link to the output from a process running on an another
machine (in this case in the UK, running
some server).
These days, I'm working a lot with Win-CGI. You might want to look at
some of my Win-CGI experiments.
NOTE: this web site is on my laptop, so it's not always online!