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Need to supercharge your Web site? Got a database of products, and no way to get them online. You need to harness the power of CGI programming. Using languages such as Perl, ASP and PHP, you can create interactive, intelligent sites. This is part one of the series that appeared in .net magazine. Subscribe now so you don't any of the upcoming articles!
 
An intro to Perl

Matt Kynaston introduces the basics of CGI programming and shows you how to put a chat room on your site

What's a camel got to do with it?

If you've been building Web pages for a while, sooner or later you'll come across a site with features you'd dearly love to include in your own. It could be a discussion board, a site-wide search, pages that let users enter personal details that the site stores. No amount of tweaking in your favourite HTML editor can achieve the same effects.

The magic that drives most of these sites are CGI programs. Because CGI programs run on the server, instead of the users browser, they can do almost anything.They're normally found in a directory called the 'cgi-bin', and their power lies in getting information from the user and doing something with it.

Over the next few issues, we're going to open the lid of the cgi-bin, and show you how to make your site respond to users like never before. CGI programming sounds intimidating, but all that bin normally contains are scripts. You should be familiar with HTML before you start, but won't need anything else.

Perl before swine

The vast majority of CGI programs are written in a language called Perl. It started life as a tool to help Unix system administrators carry out routine, boring tasks. But with the advent of the Web, people realised it could be used to create interactive online applications. The back end of the search engine Yahoo was written entirely in Perl - so were tons of other sites.

Unlike languages like C, Perl scripts aren't compiled into some unintelligible binary program. Instead you just upload a text file containing the script, and the Perl interpreter on your host's server takes care of running it.

Click to view full size

Ever wondered what that question mark and other weird stuff is doing in the URL when you're using Yahoo? That's CGI in action

This is important. For one thing, it makes Perl scripts easy to modify and pass around to your friends, which in turn means there's tons of free programs out there that, with a little modification, will do just about anything you could wish for. It also means they can run on any operating system, so long as it has a Perl interpreter installed. And the Perl interpreters are free too. We like free.

We're going to show you how to use Perl scripts on your own site and give you just enough knowledge of the language so you can customise them if you need to. But this isn't going to be a tutorial on programming in Perl. If you like what you see and want to start bashing out code yourself, there's some excellent books that'll help (see the Resources box) and a whole online community of 'Perl Mongers' waiting to welcome you into their (sometimes strange) world.

There's another reason for only scratching at Perl. Although it's powerful, well respected, and an excellent thing to have a nodding acquaintance with, it wasn't originally built for Web design. In recent years, a whole bunch of other languages have been created just to handle the task of interactive Web design, including Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP), Java's JSP and a completely Open Source language called PHP. They're much easier than Perl to learn and use, so we'll devote the third and fourth part of this series to them.

NEXT: Setting up a server

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