CGI (Common Gateway Interface):

Web-to-database connecting technologies

To build a bridge between web and enterprise database, a number of alternative technologies and architectures have been available. These include:

CGI (Common Gateway Interface):

CGI is a Web standard for accessing external programs, to integrate databases with Web servers. CGI Dynamically generates HTML documents from back-end databases. CGI programs can be written in any scripting language (interpreted) or programming language available to be executed on a web server, including C, C++, Fortran, PERL, TCL, VB and others.

Drawbacks:

 Each time a CGI script is spawned, it creates an additional process on the server machine, slowing the server’s response time.

CGI has difficult time maintaining state

Web server APIs

E.g., Microsoft’s ISAPI, Netscape API (NSAPI)

Invoked by third party software to access remote database

JDBC

            Used in Java programming language to program Java applets to access back-end databases