CGI

CGI is an abbreviation for Common Gateway Interface. http://www.w3c.org/ is one body which proposes and approves standards for internet applications - see [quote reference] for CGI related standards.

Benny Riefenstahl: See the Apache FAQ: "Where can I find the 'CGI specification'?" [L1 ].

In Tcl, ncgi is a module in tcllib that deals with CGI. Another useful package is Don Libes's cgi.tcl. ncgi, along with html-htmlparse, and later javascript, essentially factors cgi.tcl, while introducing namespace amenities.

[List other useful references - perhaps like Apache's mod_dtcl, etc.]

[I should make a point of explaining clearly that there are several distinct approaches to CGI coding with Tcl, including:

• ncgi
• cgi.tcl
• JM Ivler's book BOOK CGI Developer's Resource - Web Programming in Tcl and Perl
• http://cui.unige.ch/eao/www/prod/http-query-setup.txt
• "by hand", described in "Writing simple CGI applications using vanilla Tcl" and "Using Tcl to write CGI applications"
• "Wikit under CGI"
• cgilib.tcl from Brent Welch's BOOK Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, Third edition. ncgi is descended from and largely supersedes cgilib.
• websh can be used in CGI mode for Apache 1.3 and 2.0
• cgi by hand
• Playing CGI
• cgibitch
• FastCGI is also likely to be of interest.
• cgiget

To the extent that CGI is used in the casual sense of "dynamically generated web pages, or forms handling, or Web application", there is also AOLServer, with its built-in TCL interpreter and database hooks, and nstcl, which is a TCL-only extension which has AOLServer's API to http queries and database handling, as well as a templating library.

As is Apache Tcl and Rivet.

Tclhttpd supports dynamically generated content, and also optionally implements the vanilla CGI API as one of its Tclhttpd Domains.