Overview

When you first start building a web site, you begin work with static HTML pages. Each page contains the HTML code that the browser renders into what the user sees. In a static web page, the HTML is all there is--there is no real "behind the scenes" action on the server to build the web page. The page is defined simply by an HTML file. You can accomplish a lot with static HTML pages.

But when your web site starts to grow, you can quickly find yourself in situations where you are replicating large or complex or tedious sections of HTML code across more and more of your static HTML files. You can also run into problems where you regularly have to modify existing pages to account for the creation of new pages, even though the existing content is really not changing. This can turn into a major hassle.

One solution to the limitations of static HTML is to build some of your pages dynamically using CGI code on the server. CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, and it is the protocol used for communication between the web server and the code that creates the dynamic data. In common usage, "a CGI" is the piece of code written to create the dynamic data and return it to the web server (which in turn sends it back to the browser). Thus we refer to these little programs as "CGIs".

CGIs can be written in any language. It is really a matter of whether a given web server platform can run the CGI and communicate with it.

Dyno CGI is a set of C++ classes that you can use to write CGIs that you compile to run on your web server.

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