can someone clarify this for me (cgi/asp..etc..)
From what I undersand CGI & ASP aren't programming and/or scripting languages.
Then what are they... "standards" .... if so ... standards of what.
What languages can you use to program CGI and what languages can you use to program ASP??? Are CGI & ASP different versions of the same thing ???
Is PHP a language or standard like CGI & ASP???
How can a page on the Internet end w/ blabla.php or blabla.cgi or blabal.asp but never w/ balbal.c or blabla.pl
Re: can someone clarify this for me (cgi/asp..etc..)
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Originally posted here by unhappy
[B]From what I undersand CGI & ASP aren't programming and/or scripting languages.
Neither CGI nor ASP specifies the language you must use. However ASP is much more picky about its friends.
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Then what are they... "standards" .... if so ... standards of what.
CGI is the common gateway interface. I think it's basically something which was developed with the CERN HTTP daemon in the early days of the worldwide web. It's now supported by Apache (a direct descendent of CERN) and most other servers.
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What languages can you use to program CGI
Anything which can produce a standalone executable or be used as a script interpreter (on Unix). Provided you can manipulate standard input/output, and access environment variables.
That pretty much rules VB out, as it has no way to access standard input/output (in fact you can't make console apps with it at all as far as I know).
But nearly anything else.
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and what languages can you use to program ASP???
In principle, any language which implements a given COM interface specified by microsoft. This requires the interpreter (or VM, it doesn't have to be interpreted) to be in a .DLL and work by certain standards.
The language also needs to be able to access particular COM interfaces, and it is much easier if it also can use IDispatch to send text-based commands to objects.
In practice, this means Microsoft VBScript or Microsoft JScript. In principle there are others but they are unreliable, and unsupported by Microsoft and component vendors (who give you the cold shoulder if you're not using VBScript).
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Are CGI & ASP different versions of the same thing ???
Absolutely not. Microsoft invented ASP as a more performant replacement for CGI. CGI requires starting a new process, which is an expensive process, particularly under Windows NT.
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Is PHP a language or standard like CGI & ASP???
No. PHP is its own language which integrates directly with web servers. You can use PHP with CGI (after a fashion), but it's not the normal way of doing it.
ASP and PHP do not talk to each other as far as I'm aware.
Slarty