CGI stands for "Common Gateway Interface." It's a standard that allows external programs or scripts to connect with a web server to generate dynamic content and respond to web requests.
In the context of web development, CGI works as follows: When a web server receives a request for a dynamic resource (such as a PHP, Perl, or Python file), it invokes the corresponding CGI script. This script is called with the necessary parameters of the request and then performs a specific task, such as generating HTML, querying a database, or executing computations. The result is then returned to the web server, which forwards it to the client.
CGI was one of the earliest mechanisms that enabled the integration of dynamic content on web pages and laid the groundwork for many later technologies like PHP, ASP, JSP, and others. While it is still used today, faster and more efficient methods such as FastCGI and mod_php (for Apache) or WSGI (for Python) are widely adopted. These technologies offer improved performance and scalability compared to plain CGI.
