[cobbzilla]

Maybe dumb question: how does the server “decide” anything other than what file to serve? Today we have many choices but back in the day CGI was the first standard way to do it.

So yes query parameters existed before CGI but to use them you had to hack your server to do something with them (iirc NCSA web servers had some magic hacks for queries). CGI drove standardization.

[stirfish]

    func specialHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
 if time.Now().Weekday() == time.Tuesday {
  http.NotFound(w, r)
  return
 }

     fmt.Fprintln(w, "server made a decision")
    }

Your server can make decisions however you program it to, you know? It's just software.

Forgive the phone-posting.

[cobbzilla]

and what server software is running this code in 1995?

[lispwitch]

CL-HTTP or AOLserver

[cobbzilla]

sure looks like VB there, what’s the plugin? Didn’t see anything like that before.

[heavensteeth]

That's Go.

[cobbzilla]

Which runs on what computer in 1995?

[losvedir]

TCP has been around a long time. Listen, read, send, you're good to go. It's just software so you can make it do anything.

But you're asking about the relationship between popular primarily file serving servers like Apache and their relationship to high level code to create custom responses? Yeah, CGI was the first big standard there that I remember, though it was a bit before my time. But that's only one possible architecture.

These days, most web apps have the web server built in, and so the custom code you're writing works with the full request directly. There may be a lightweight web server in front (or multiple), like nginx, to manage connections, but they will largely just proxy the whole thing through.

[cobbzilla]

I was responding to:

> Query strings existed before CGI did… There's nothing wrong about having things decided by the server

Sure, but there is also no standard for how to format/parse the query string. And also no server plugin frameworks. So you are inventing your own standard and extending some HTTP server for which you have source. Until CGI forces a standard, bad as it might be; it’s a common ground.