Another good reason was the relative ease of application development. At least in the
beginning when webapps were fairly simple things done with little more than HTML and simple
back-end CGI programs, almost anyone could quickly and easily pick it up. The learning
curve was not all that high, even for those who had not done much application development
before.
CHAPTER 1 n AN INTRODUCTION TO AJAX, RPC, AND MODERN RIAS 7
Figure 1-3. The Omnytex Technologies site (www.omnytex.com) as seen in Lynx, a text-based
browser
MORE ON CGI
CGI, which stands for Common Gateway Interface, is a protocol used to interface an external software application
with some information server, typically a web server. This mechanism allows for passing of requests
from the client, a web browser in the case of a web server, to the server. The server then returns the output
of the CGI application execution to the client.
CGI began its life based on discussions on the mailing list www-talk involving many individuals including
Rob McCool. Rob was working at NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), and he wrote
the initial CGI specification based on those discussions and also provided the first ???reference??? implementation
for the NCSA HTTPd web server (which, after morphing a lot and being renamed, became the ubiquitous
Apache web server we all know and love today).
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