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CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. It is the standard programming interface between web servers and external programs. Basically, CGI allows your Web pages to run programs written in any language your server supports. Some Web servers require CGI programs to be stored in a directory on your server named cgi-bin.
Perl, PHP, ASP and JSP are all programming languages that are commonly used as server side scripting languages. You can run scripts written in these languages from your web pages, and they will be executed each time the page is accessed. This allows you to create dynamic and interactive Web pages. To use any of these languages, your web server must support them.
Perl is a general purpose programming language that is fast and flexible. It is an excellent language for performing text processing, and is a popular choice for CGI programming. For more information on Perl, see Perl.com and Perl.org.
PHP is another popular OpenSource web scripting language and is used on some pages of this web site. PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. To learn more about PHP, visit PHP.net.
Active Server Pages, or ASP, is a server-side scripting technology from Microsoft. The scripting languages usually used for writing ASP scripts are VBScript and JScript.
JSP is an acronym for Java Server Pages. It is a technology that allows Java programs to be embedded into a Web page. By mixing HTML with Java, you have the simplicity of leaving the static parts in HTML, while having Java available to build dynamic content.
If you are now ready to choose a web host, go to our Web Hosting Comparison to find a web host that fits your needs. Otherwise, browse the other sections of our web hosting FAQ to learn more about hosting:
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