Introduction to Revolution CGIs

 

Table of Contents   Each section of this tutorial depends on the ones before it. Depending on your familiarity with CGIs and Revolution, some sections may be hard to understand if taken out of order. HyperActive Software offers professional CGI services. If you would like us to help you develop a CGI, contact us at info@hyperactivesw.com. Since this is our business, we cannot answer email questions about Revolution CGIs without a consulting contract. However, if you find errors in this tutorial we would appreciate a note so that we can fix them.

Introduction

What's a CGI?

How they work

Revolution advantages

Security

The two ways to do Revolution CGIs

Installing the Revolution engine

Setting permissions

Simple CGIs

The structure of a CGI script

Things to keep in mind

First CGI: "Hello World"

Troubleshooting Tips

Creating files on the server

Example: Expanded "Hello World"

Working with text files

Example: Visitor counter

Example: Random content

Working with stacks

Example: Using stacks with CGIs

Setting up the files

Use of environment variables

Parsing URL-encoded parameters

Putting the stack in use

Creating HTML from within the script

Using stacks as libraries

Using the library command

Advantages of the library method

Changing the Addresses example

The LibCGI library

Appendix: Debugging text-based CGIs

Debugging Revolution CGIs

Quick Checklist

Other Debugging Techniques

Determining Environment Variables

Other Online References

All contents copyright (C) 1996, HyperActive Software. All rights reserved.
Revised: December 3, 2001
URL: http://www.hyperactivesw.com/mctutorial/tutorialtoc.html