OpenEuphoria

Re: How do you get CGI happening?

• Posted by Jason Gade <jaygade at ya?oo.c?m> Jan 23, 2008
• 660 views

Jerry Story wrote:
> 
> c.k.lester wrote:
> > 
> > Jerry Story wrote:
> > > 
> > > I opened the page in a browser.
> > > 
> > > But just a few minutes ago I put ecoform.htm and economy.exu on my website
> > > and
> > > then I opened ecoform.htm in a browser. At first it said POST is not
> > > allowed.
> > > So I changed POST to GET. Now it displays economy.exu. Still don't have it
> > > right.
> > > 
> > > economy.exu seems to have code in it that handles GET.
> > 
> > Jerry, you have to have a web server running that receives the incoming
> > HTTP request and is able to serve up the page. So, for example, Apache would
> > run your exu program and send the output to the browser.
> > 
> > Without the web server, nothing gets served to the browser (or it acts like
> > a file viewer).
> 
> What is a web server? I use Telus. Is Telus a web server?
> 
> This is Telus.
> http://consumer.telus.com/cgi-ebs/jsp/homepage.jsp

> 
> A few minutes ago I installed Apache. Now what do I gotta do with Apache?

I'm no expert on CGI but I think I see the problem here. Others have tried to
explain it but let me take a shot.

First, let me ask "what do you want to do"? Are you trying to serve web pages to
the world from your ISP (Telus) or are you trying to serve web pages from your
own personal computer?

Usually when you view an HTML file on your personal computer, the web browser is
just acting as a file viewer (and maybe a Javascript interpreter as well). By
itself, your web browser cannot execute CGI programs.

As others have pointed out, you really cannot make Apache work on your own
personal computer without reading some of the docs. It's not that hard, though.
When you get it running, instead of pointing your browser to
"http://c:/somefile.html" you want to point it to
"http://127.0.0.1/somefile.html". That's just a basic example, there is a little
more to it than that. But that should work if your webserver is running correctly
and "somefile.html" is in the location that the webserver expects it to be.

As for serving pages up to the world at large via your ISP, you will have to
contact their support people and tell them what you want to do and find out
whether it is possible or allowed.

Hope that helps!


--
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
system that works.
--John Gall's 15th law of Systemantics.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming."
--C.A.R. Hoare

j.