CGI, or the Common Gateway Interface, is a defined method by which a Web server can obtain information from (or send data to) other programs or files, including Web browsers, and utilize that data on the server machine. Perl is one of the more popular languages for writing CGI scripts, but practically every language includes functions and capabilities (or has modules available containing functions and capabilities) allowing them to access CGI data.

This FAQ was written by Nick Kew, and has been considerably improved with the help of comments and criticisms, newsgroup posts and miscellaneous suggestions from correspondents including Nathan Neulinger, Maurice L. Marvin, Matthew Healy, Alan J. Flavell, Don Libes, Alain Deckers, David S. Jackson, J.M. Ivler, and no doubt others I've forgotten to credit (please remind me if necessary).

These examples cover using Java for both the client and the server side of the CGI process. The client-side part covers using GET and POST from applets to talk to CGI programs (regardless of what language the CGI programs are written in). The server-side part covers implementing CGI programs in Java that handle GET and POST (regardless of whether the client uses HTML forms or applets), and also includes a URL decoder and CGI form parser in Java (and a similar parser for cookie values).

Webstat is a freeware CGI application for generating and showing web statisics for your website. With Webstat you can get statistics about hit counts, refering page, visitors country, visitors IP-address, visitors domaine name, hit count charts with arbitrary acurracy and size etc. The statistics presentation page can be customised with your on html code.

CGI Expert is a powerful component suite for Delphi and C++Builder (Std, Pro or C/S), making interactive, dynamically created web sites as simple as dropping a component on to a form. One of the greatest benefits with CGI Expert is its common class interface for simultaneous support of the following interfaces: CGI, Win-CGI, ISAPI, NSAPI, WSAPI.