What is Perl and why do so many people use it for CGI?

In order to understand Perl and why so many people use it for CGI, perhaps it will be prudent to first look at what CGI stands for and then later correlate and understand why so many people use them together.

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface

Common because it can be used by many different languages and at the same time interact with many different types of systems.

Gateway because its strength lies in its potential to allow access to other systems such as databases and graphic generators.

Interface because you can write other programs that use it by providing a well defined way to call up its features.

Common Gateway Interface programs that include C, Perl or Visual Basic are designed to accept and return data that conforms to the Common Gateway Interface specification are the most common way for Web servers to interact dynamically with users by providing forms, scripts or programs that can run on the web server or on the user's machine. You can learn more on CGI here.

A problem associated with CGI is that a new process is started each time a CGI script is executed. For busy web sites, this can slow down the server. This though can be overcome by the use of Java servlets or by using a server’s APL such as ISAPI.

Correlations.

Most CGI applications involve accessing external programs and applications and then manipulating that data in some fashion. Perl programming language originally developed for text manipulation provides easy to use tools that make these tasks a cinch because of its increased flexibility, portability, usefulness, and its varied features.

Perl is an Open Source software, if you want you can be able to download it for free here on the other hand if you are already running a Linux system, most UNIX systems including Mac OS X, then more than likely your package included installation of perl.

Because of its stability it's now days used for mission critical projects in the private and public sectors for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

Why do so many people use it for CGI?

1. Perl is a friendly language that easily plays well with your personal programming style.

2. Most of what is being done on the Web happens with text, perl programming language was designed for text processing.

3. It has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules.

Tutorial.

Although not a requirement, in order to take the tutorial, it is recommended that you have a general understanding of Web Development as well as some background knowledge of HTML and CSS before you start to take the tutorial here.

Features.

Some of its major features include:

• It’s easy to use.

• Supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.

• Has powerful built-in support for text processing.

• Takes the best features from other languages.

• Works well with HTML, XML, and other mark up languages.

• Can handle encrypted Web data, such as e-commerce transactions.

• It can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing.

And many more.

Close Perl and return to
Window Linux features