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by frou_dh 3387 days ago
It's usually not advisable, but I genuinely think classical CGI is beautiful mechanism for dynamically generated pages. It's a natural extension of Unix scripting: shebang'd scripts in any language, environment variables, stdout. Job's a good'un.
2 comments
seanp2k2 3387 days ago
Funny aside, it took me many months as a teenager who did not know the ways of *nix to "get" CGI. It was very enlightening to eventually realize that it was so simple that it had eluded my understanding. My mind, coming from messing with Win32 in Visual Basic 5, refused to believe that you just make a program that writes plaintext out to the console, and that text is what gets sent to the browser, and that just works.

If you work on web apps, you absolutely owe it to yourself to understand HTTP and CGI. The one page I'd recommend to quickly grok CGI is http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/ch01_04.html . Also learn how to use cURL and understand everything that is happening inside the Network tab of Chrome or Firefox dev tools (they're very similar these days). Set up MITMProxy between your proxy server and your apache2/nginx, put it into reverse proxy mode and point the proxy at it, then it at httpd, and understand what you're seeing.

I don't have a good link for HTTP but I promise it'll help a ton with debugging things and generally having a sense of what's going on at every level.

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coliveira 3387 days ago
What is good for developers is bad for the industry. How else would they justify creating frameworks in different languages if all people are doing anyway is writing text to (F)CGI stdout? It is much better for the companies/groups involved to make people believe that there is something wrong with this and that they should really be using a "proper" framework.
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woah 3387 days ago
Who do you think is making money off open source frameworks?
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coliveira 3387 days ago
The whole cottage industry of software engineers, authors, and consultants who implement these solutions.
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pjmlp 3387 days ago
Consultants that wrote those frameworks in first place and offer their services for help, or go to conferences giving talks about them.
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seanp2k2 3387 days ago
Yep, in many cases the frameworks arise from patterns someone solved while working for BigCo, then decided that the pattern they used was cool enough to share with and be useful for others. Open source is hugely thankless and tons of work, but it can be very rewarding in ways you can't buy, including meeting with interesting / awesome people.
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