I have a tool which supports interactive queries though tcl shell. I want to create a web application through which users can send different queries to the tool. I have done some basic programming using Apache web server and cgi scripts, but i am unable to think of a way to keep the shell alive and send queries to that.
Some more information:
Let me describe it more. Tool builds a graph data structure, after building users can query for information using tcl shell, something like get all child nodes of a particular node. I cannot build the data structure with every query because building takes lot of time. I want to build the data structure and somehow keep the shell alive. Apache server should send all the queries to that shell and return the responses back to the user
You might want to create a daemon process, perhaps using expect, that spawns your interactive program. The daemon program could listen to queries over TCP using Tcl's socket command. Your CGI program would create a client socket to talk to the daemopn.
I'd embed the graph-managing program into an interpreter that's also running a small webserver (e.g., tclhttpd, though that's not the only option) and have the rest of the world interact with the graph through RESTful web accesses. This could then be integrated behind Apache in any way you like — a CGI thunk would work, or you could do request forwarding, or you could write some server-side code to do it (there's many options there!) — or you could even just let clients connect directly. Many options would work.
The question appears to be incomplete as you did not specify what exactly does "interactive" mean with regard to your tool.
How does it support interactive queries? Does it call gets in a kind of endless loop and processed each line as it's read? If so, the solution to your problem is simple: the Tcl shell is not really concerned about whether its standard input is connected to an interactive terminal or not. So just spawn your tool in your CGI request handling code, write the user's query to that process's stdin stream, flush it and then read all the text written by that process to its stdout and stderr streams. Then send them back to the browser. How exactly to spawn the process and communicate with it via its standard streams heavily depends on your CGI code.
If you don't get the idea, try writing your query to a file and then do comething like
$ tclsh /path/to/your/tool/script.tcl </path/to/the/query.file
and you should have the tool to respond in a usual way.
If the interaction is carried using some other way in your tool, then you probably have to split it to a "core" and "front-end" parts so that the core just reads queries and outputs results, and the front-end part carries out interaction. Then hook up that core to your CGI processing code in a way outlined above.
In my opinion, web server is responsible to deliver content to client. If it is static content like pictures and static html document, web server just deliver them as bitstream directly. If it is some dynamic content that is generated during processing client's request, the web server will not generate the conetnt itself but call some external proram to genearte the content.
AFAIK, this kind of dynamice content generation technologies include the following:
CGI
ISAPI
...
And from here, I noticed that:
...In IIS 7, modules replace ISAPI
filters...
Is there any others? Could anyone help me complete the above list and elabrate on or show some links to their evolution? I think it would be very helpful to understand application such as IIS, TomCat, and Apache.
I once wrote a small CGI program, and though it serves as a content generator, it is still nothing but a normal standalone program. I call it normal because the CGI program has a main() entry point. But with the recenetly technology like ASP.NET, I am not writing complete program, but only some class library. Why does such radical change happens?
Many thanks.
well, the biggest missing piece in your question is that you can have the webserver generating the content dynamically as well. This is common with most platforms outside of PHP and Perl. You often set that website behind apache or nginx used as a proxy, but it doesn't "call an external progam" in any reasonable sense, it forwards the http request to the proxied server. This is mostly done so you can have multiple sites on the same server, and also so you can have apache/nginx protect you against incorrect requests.
But sure, we can, for the sake of the question, say that "proxying" is a way to call an external program. :-)
Another way to "call the external program" is Pythons WSGI, where you do call a permanently running server. So again you don't start an external program, it's more like calling the module in ASP (although it's a separate program, not a module, but you don't start it with every request, you use an API).
The change from calling external programs as in CGI to calling modules like in ASP.NET, process with WGI or proxying to another webserver happened because with CGI you have to start a new prpogram for each request. The PERL/PHP interpreter needs to be laoded into memory, and all modules they use as well. This quickly becomes very heavy and process/memory intensive.
Therefore, to be able to use bigger systems that are permanently running, other techniques have been developed. Most of them are platform/language dependent, and the only one that is platform independent is really to make a complete webserver and then use apache/nginx as a proxy in front (in which case the apache/nginx strictly isn't necessary any more).
I hope this cleared things up a bit.
fastcgi and wsgi are two more interfaces content generators can use to talk to a webserver -- the reason more recent interfaces aren't complete programs is that forking and executing things that expect to be executables is costly.
OTOH, writing your little generator in such a way that it doesn't leak anything between invocations is harder than having the liberty to just exit at the end (and rely on environment variables and command line arguments like a normal executable).
This is all for performance reasons, but then you have more complicated content generators and process management in the webservers.
I'm looking for references stating how to write a web scripting language and interface it with a web-server.
I'm not looking for "how to write the language" or "how to write an interpreter" references rather - I don't know how the basics of a web-script interpreter work? Is it a simply a CGI based interpreter that is passed the HTTP parameters through stdin then interprets the script and pushes the output back to stdout?
What about interfacing and registering with the web-server (IIS, Apache) how is that done? Again, through stdin/stdout?
Any basic examples, references or comments would be appreciated.
Eric Lippert had a series of posts on building your own script engine. They may be of help/interest:
SimpleScript, Part Zero
SimpleScript Part One: DllMain is Boring
SimpleScript Part Two: Class Factories Are Also Boring
SimpleScript Part Three: Engine Skeleton
SimpleScript Part Four: Finite State Machines and Script Engines
SimpleScript Part Five: Named Items and Modules
SimpleScript Part Six: Threading Technicalities
SimpleScript Part Seven: Binder Skeleton
Is it a simply a CGI based interpreter that is passed
the HTTP parameters through stdin then interprets the
script and pushes the output back to stdout?
It could be.
What about interfacing and registering with the
web-server (IIS, Apache) how is that done?
If it is CGI, then you would use their built in CGI modules.
Otherwise, you might use FastCGI (again with built in modules), or the APIs provided by the server: Apache, IIS
This is certainly going to be server-dependent. Apache is very modular and afaik uses own IPC protocol. In any case, the interpreter should be something that is started up once for the server, not once per request. As far as IPC, stdin is one option as you mentioned; others would be shared memory, pipes, or localhost TCP.
CGI is a Common Gateway Interface. As the name says, it is a "common" gateway interface for everything. It is so trivial and naive from the name. I feel that I understood this and I felt this every time I encountered this word. But frankly, I didn't. I'm still confused.
I am a PHP programmer with web development experience.
user (client) request for page ---> webserver(->embedded PHP
interpreter) ----> Server side(PHP) Script ---> MySQL Server.
Now say my PHP Script can fetch results from MySQL server & MATLAB server & some other server.
So, now PHP Script is the CGI? Because its interface for the between webserver & All other servers? I don't know. Sometimes they call CGI, a technology & other times they call CGI a program or some other server.
What exactly is CGI?
Whats the big deal with /cgi-bin/*.cgi? What's up with this? I don't know what is this cgi-bin directory on the server for. I don't know why they have *.cgi extensions.
Why does Perl always comes in the way. CGI & Perl (language). I also don't know what's up with these two. Almost all the time I keep hearing these two in combination "CGI & Perl". This book is another great example CGI Programming with Perl. Why not "CGI Programming with PHP/JSP/ASP"? I never saw such things.
CGI Programming in C, confuses me a lot. "in C"?? Seriously?? I don't know what to say. I'm just confused. "in C"?? This changes everything. Program needs to be compiled and executed. This entirely changes my view of web programming. When do I compile? How does the program gets executed (because it will be a machine code, so it must execute as a independent process). How does it communicate with the web server? IPC? and interfacing with all the servers (in my example MATLAB & MySQL) using socket programming? I'm lost!!
People say that CGI is deprecated and isn't in use anymore. Is that so? What is the latest update?
Once, I ran into a situation where I
had to give HTTP PUT request access to
web server (Apache HTTPD). Its a long
back. So, as far as I remember this is
what I did:
Edited the configuration file of Apache HTTPD to tell webserver to pass
all HTTP PUT requests to some
put.php ( I had to write this PHP
script)
Implement put.php to handle the request (save the file to the location
mentioned)
People said that I wrote a CGI Script.
Seriously, I didn't have a clue what
they were talking about.
Did I really write CGI Script?
I hope you understood what my confusion is. (Because I myself don't know where I'm confused). I request you guys to keep your answer as simple as possible. I really can't understand any fancy technical terminology. At least not in this case.
EDIT:
I found this amazing tutorial "CGI Programming Is Simple!" - CGI Tutorial, which explains the concepts in simplest possible way. After reading this article you may want to read Getting Started with CGI Programming in C to supplement your understanding with actual code samples. I've also added these links to this tutorial to Wikipedia's article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
CGI is an interface which tells the webserver how to pass data to and from an application. More specifically, it describes how request information is passed in environment variables (such as request type, remote IP address), how the request body is passed in via standard input, and how the response is passed out via standard output. You can refer to the CGI specification for details.
To use your image:
user (client) request for page ---> webserver ---[CGI]----> Server side Program ---> MySQL Server.
Most if not all, webservers can be configured to execute a program as a 'CGI'. This means that the webserver, upon receiving a request, will forward the data to a specific program, setting some environment variables and marshalling the parameters via standard input and standard output so the program can know where and what to look for.
The main benefit is that you can run ANY executable code from the web, given that both the webserver and the program know how CGI works. That's why you could write web programs in C or Bash with a regular CGI-enabled webserver. That, and that most programming environments can easily use standard input, standard output and environment variables.
In your case you most likely used another, specific for PHP, means of communication between your scripts and the webserver, this, as you well mention in your question, is an embedded interpreter called mod_php.
So, answering your questions:
What exactly is CGI?
See above.
Whats the big deal with /cgi-bin/*.cgi? Whats up with this? I don't know what is this cgi-bin directory on the server for. I don't know why they have *.cgi extensions.
That's the traditional place for cgi programs, many webservers come with this directory pre configured to execute all binaries there as CGI programs. The .cgi extension denotes an executable that is expected to work through the CGI.
Why does Perl always comes in the way. CGI & Perl (language). I also don't know whats up with these two. Almost all the time I keep hearing these two in combination "CGI & Perl". This book is another great example CGI Programming with Perl Why not "CGI Programming with PHP/JSP/ASP". I never saw such things.
Because Perl is ancient (older than PHP, JSP and ASP which all came to being when CGI was already old, Perl existed when CGI was new) and became fairly famous for being a very good language to serve dynamic webpages via the CGI. Nowadays there are other alternatives to run Perl in a webserver, mainly mod_perl.
CGI Programming in C this confuses me a lot. in C?? Seriously?? I don't know what to say. I"m just confused. "in C"?? This changes everything. Program needs to be compiled and executed. This entirely changes my view of web programming. When do I compile? How does the program gets executed (because it will be a machine code, so it must execute as a independent process). How does it communicate with the web server? IPC? and interfacing with all the servers (in my example MATLAB & MySQL) using socket programming? I'm lost!!
You compile the executable once, the webserver executes the program and passes the data in the request to the program and outputs the received response. CGI specifies that one program instance will be launched per each request. This is why CGI is inefficient and kind of obsolete nowadays.
They say that CGI is deprecated. Its no more in use. Is it so? What is its latest update?
CGI is still used when performance is not paramount and a simple means of executing code is required. It is inefficient for the previously stated reasons and there are more modern means of executing any program in a web enviroment. Currently the most famous is FastCGI.
What exactly is CGI?
A means for a web server to get its data from a program (instead of, for instance, a file).
Whats the big deal with /cgi-bin/*.cgi?
No big deal. It is just a convention.
I don't know what is this cgi-bin directory on the server for.
I don't know why they have *.cgi extensions.
The server has to know what to do with the file (i.e. treat it as a program to execute instead of something to simply serve up). Having a .html extension tells it to use a text/html content type. Having a .cgi extension tells it to run it as a program.
Keeping executables in a separate directory gives some added protection against executing incorrect files and/or serving up CGI programs as raw data in case the server gets misconfigured.
Why does Perl always comes in the way.
It doesn't. Perl was just big and popular at the same time as CGI.
I haven't used Perl CGI for years. I was using mod_perl for a long time, and tend towards PSGI/Plack with FastCGI these days.
This book is another great example CGI Programming with Perl
Why not "CGI Programming with PHP/JSP/ASP".
CGI isn't very efficient. Better methods for talking to programs from webservers came along at around the same time as PHP. JSP and ASP are different methods for talking to programs.
CGI Programming in C this confuses me a lot. in C?? Seriously??
It is a programming language, why not?
When do I compile?
Write code
Compile
Access URL
Webserver runs program
How does the program gets executed (because it will be a machine code, so it must execute as a independent process).
It doesn't have to execute as an independent process (you can write Apache modules in C), but the whole concept of CGI is that it launches an external process.
How does it communicate with the web server? IPC?
STDIN/STDOUT and environment variables — as defined in the CGI specification.
and interfacing with all the servers (in my example MATLAB & MySQL) using socket
programming?
Using whatever methods you like and are supported.
They say that CGI is depreciated. Its no more in use. Is it so?
CGI is inefficient, slow and simple. It is rarely used, when it is used, it is because it is simple. If performance isn't a big deal, then simplicity is worth a lot.
What is its latest update?
1.1
CGI is an interface specification between a web server (HTTP server) and an executable program of some type that is to handle a particular request.
It describes how certain properties of that request should be communicated to the environment of that program and how the program should communicate the response back to the server and how the server should 'complete' the response to form a valid reply to the original HTTP request.
For a while CGI was an IETF Internet Draft and as such had an expiry date. It expired with no update so there was no CGI 'standard'. It is now an informational RFC, but as such documents common practice and isn't a standard itself. rfc3875.txt, rfc3875.html
Programs implementing a CGI interface can be written in any language runnable on the target machine. They must be able to access environment variables and usually standard input and they generate their output on standard output.
Compiled languages such as C were commonly used as were scripting languages such as perl, often using libraries to make accessing the CGI environment easier.
One of the big disadvantages of CGI is that a new program is spawned for each request so maintaining state between requests could be a major performance issue. The state might be handled in cookies or encoded in a URL, but if it gets to large it must be stored elsewhere and keyed from encoded url information or a cookie. Each CGI invocation would then have to reload the stored state from a store somewhere.
For this reason, and for a greatly simple interface to requests and sessions, better integrated environments between web servers and applications are much more popular. Environments like a modern php implementation with apache integrate the target language much better with web server and provide access to request and sessions objects that are needed to efficiently serve http requests. They offer a much easier and richer way to write 'programs' to handle HTTP requests.
Whether you wrote a CGI script rather depends on interpretation. It certainly did the job of one but it is much more usual to run php as a module where the interface between the script and the server isn't strictly a CGI interface.
The CGI is specified in RFC 3875, though that is a later "official" codification of the original NCSA document. Basically, CGI defines a protocol to pass data about a HTTP request from a webserver to a program to process - any program, in any language. At the time the spec was written (1993), most web servers contained only static pages, "web apps" were a rare and new thing, so it seemed natural to keep them apart from the "normal" static content, such as in a cgi-bin directory apart from the static content, and having them end in .cgi.
At this time, here also were no dedicated "web programming languages" like PHP, and C was the dominating portable programming language - so many people wrote their CGI scripts in C. But Perl quickly turned out to be a better fit for this kind of thing, and CGI became almost synonymous with Perl for a while. Then there came Java Servlets, PHP and a bunch of others and took over large parts of Perl's market share.
Have a look at CGI in Wikipedia. CGI is a protocol between the web server and a external program or a script that handles the input and generates output that is sent to the browser.
CGI is a simply a way for web server and a program to communicate, nothing more, nothing less. Here the server manages the network connection and HTTP protocol and the program handles input and generates output that is sent to the browser. CGI script can be basically any program that can be executed by the webserver and follows the CGI protocol. Thus a CGI program can be implemented, for example, in C. However that is extremely rare, since C is not very well suited for the task.
/cgi-bin/*.cgi is a simply a path where people commonly put their CGI script. Web server are commonly configured by default to fetch CGI scripts from that path.
a CGI script can be implemented also in PHP, but all PHP programs are not CGI scripts. If webserver has embedded PHP interpreter (e.g. mod_php in Apache), then the CGI phase is skipped by more efficient direct protocol between the web server and the interpreter.
Whether you have implemented a CGI script or not depends on how your script is being executed by the web server.
CGI essentially passes the request off to any interpreter that is configured with the web server - This could be Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, C pretty much anything. Perl was the most common back in the day thats why you often see it in reference to CGI.
CGI is not dead. In fact most large hosting companies run PHP as CGI as opposed to mod_php because it offers user level config and some other things while it is slower than mod_php. Ruby and Python are also typically run as CGI. they key difference here is that a server module runs as part of the actual server software - where as with CGI its totally outside the server The server just uses the CGI module to determine how to pass and recieve data to the outside interpreter.
CGI is a mechanism whereby an external program is called by the web server in order to handle a request, with environment variables and standard input being used to feed the request data to the program. The exact language the external program is written in does not matter, although it is easier to write CGI programs in some languages versus others.
Since CGI scripts need execute permissions, httpd by default only allows CGI programs in the cgi-bin directory to be run for (possibly now misguided) security purposes.
Most PHP scripts run in the web server process via mod_php. This is not CGI.
CGI is slow since the program (and related interpreter) must be started up per request. Modern alternatives are embedded execution, used by mod_php, and long-running processes, used by FastCGI. A given language may have its own way of implementing those mechanisms, so be sure to ask around before resorting to CGI.
A real-life example: a complicated database that needs to be shown on a website. Since the database was designed somewhere around 1986 (!), lots of data was packed in different ways to save on disk space.
As the development went on, the developers could no longer solve complicated data requests in SQL alone, for example because the sorting algorythms were unusual.
There are three sensible solutions:
quick and dirty: send the unsored data to PHP, sort it there. Obviously a very expensive solution, because this would be repeated every time the page is called
write a plugin to the database engine -- but the admin wasn't ready to allow foreign code to run on their server, or
you can process the data in a program (C, Perl, etc.), and output HTML. The program itself goes into /cgi-bin, and is called by the web server (e.g. Apache) directly, not through PHP.
CGI runs your script in Solution #3 and outputs the effect to the browser. You have the speed of the compiled program, the flexibility of a language broader than SQL, and no need to write plugins to the SQL server. (Again, this is an example specific to SQL and C)
A CGI script is a console/shell program. In Windows, when you use a "Command Prompt" window, you execute console programs. When a web server executes a CGI script it provides input to the console/shell program using environment variables or "standard input". Standard input is like typing data into a console/shell program; in the case of a CGI script, the web server does the typing. The CGI script writes data out to "standard output" and that output is sent to the client (the web browser) as a HTML page. Standard output is like the output you see in a console/shell program except the web server reads it and sends it out.
A CGI script can be executed from a browser. The URI typically includes a query string that is provided to the CGI script. If the method is "get" then the query string is provided to the CGI Script in an environment variable called QUERY_STRING. If the method is "post" then the query string is provided to the CGI Script using standard input (the CGI Script reads the query string from standard input).
An early use of CGI scripts was to process forms. In the beginning of HTML, HTML forms typically had an "action" attribute and a button designated as the "submit" button. When the submit button is pushed the URI specified in the "action" attribute would be sent to the server with the data from the form sent as a query string. If the "action" specifies a CGI script then the CGI script would be executed and it then produces a HTML page.
RFC 3875 "The Common Gateway Interface (CGI)" partially defines CGI using C, as in saying that environment variables "are accessed by the C library routine getenv() or variable environ".
If you are developing a CGI script using C/C++ and use Microsoft Visual Studio to do that then you would develop a console program.
You maybe want to know what is not CGI, and the answer is a MODULE for your web server (if I suppose you are runnig Apache). AND THAT'S THE BIG DIFERENCE, because CGI needs and external program, thread, whatever to instantiate a PERL, PHP, C app server where when you run as a MODULE that program is the web server (apache) per-se.
Because of all this there is a lot of performance, security, portability issues that come into play. But it's good to know what is not CGI first, to understand what it is.
A CGI is a program (or a Web API) you write, and save it on the Web Server site. CGI is a file.
This file sits and waits on the Web Server. When the client browser sends a request to the Web Server to execute your CGI file, the Web Server runs your CGI file on the server site. The inputs for this CGI program, if any, are from the client browser. The outputs of this CGI program are sent to the browser.
What language you use to write a CGI program? Other posts already mention c,java, php, perl, etc.
The idea behind CGI is that a program/script (whether Perl or even C) receives input via STDIN (the request data) and outputs data via STDOUT (echo, printf statements).
The reason most PHP scripts don't qualify is that they are run under the PHP Apache module.
How would an application interface with a CGI binary? For example, say my app is running on Windows and wants to invoke the PHP.exe binary in the context of a web server. How would I do this? By passing some sort of command line arguments? I am using C++, if that helps.
NOTE - I know how to invoke processes and such. I just want to know how CGI fits into this.
The CGI interface works as follows: when a request comes, the Web server runs a process, the HTTP input (AKA POST data) is supplied to the process via stdin, the generated content and headers are emitted via stdout. Server variables are passed via environment.
Now, your question is not clear enough. Do you have a CGI-compliant local binary that you want to invoke from a program? Or do you want to invoke a CGI-compliant binary somewhere on a Web server?
In the former case, use regular means of process creation (CreateProcess, fork/exec), with I/O pipes redirected. In the latter case, use a HTTP client library (curl, WinInet) to issue an HTTP request.