PHP versus CGI

[Alain Farmer]

Hello Shari,

> Using .php to "mail" something is another
> option. Though I'm not sure how that would
> differ from cgi.

They accomplish the same goal, e.g. web pages
generated and customized ondemand, but there are major
differences some of which I enumerate here :

* PHP is widely-used and popular ;
* PHP deals with many of the intricit details ;
* PHP is safer than CGI unless you add a lot to CGI ;
* PHP is supported by most service providers/hosts ;
* PHP is part of the very dominant dev platform: LAMP
;
  ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python ) ;
* PHP is specialized in database access, many DB
types.

PHP is basically an "easier" way to generate web pages
on the server-side. But easier is a relative term, for
us, because we are used to the simplicity of creating
CGI programs with an xCard. But for most folks,
notably those without xCard knowledge, creating a CGI
program to do something as simple as receiving data
from a web-form and storing it to disk is a daunting
task for these poor lost souls.

So there you have it!

Alain

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