Letter from the President Go to a virtual or real bookstore, review literature from industry trainers, or listen to students at a college discussing the Web. CGI is the part of a Web server which can communicate with other programs running on the server. Through CGI, the Web server is able to pass user input to a program. After the program processes the input, the Web server can pass the program's response back to the Web browser. A major application of CGI is in form processing.
Forms are a subset of HTML permitting user input.
When the form is completed by the user, the input is passed to the server which executes the program associated with the form to decode the input. For example, you might want information from a database to be provided on the Web. CGI can act as the Web gateway, using an appropriate programming language, between the user and the database. In response to the user's request, virtual HTML, text, image, or audio documents can be dynamically created. When a user opens a URL associated with a CGI script, the client asks the server for that file.