ASP.NET 2.0 Next Stop on Web Development Roadmap

Since the introduction of Internet Explorer in 1995 and Internet Information Services (IIS) the following year, Microsoft’s Web application platform has undergone major changes. The result is that developers face a large number of APIs and platforms on both the client and the server. Organizations with existing Web applications they are seeking to move forward, as well as those looking to build new applications, must examine alternatives carefully in order to make intelligent choices.

Common Server Foundation

IIS, Microsoft’s Web server, is the common foundation for all of Microsoft’s Web application efforts and provides two basic APIs for developers looking to build dynamic Web applications. (For a graphical overview of Microsoft’s server-based Web development technologies and how they build on IIS, see “Web Server Technologies“.)

Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is an industry standard API supported by virtually all Web servers on both Windows and Linux. CGI enables a Web server to hand off a request to an external application and then pass that application’s output back to the browser. This makes the CGI programming model very simple—CGI applications are console applications that receive the details of the request via standard text input and write the resulting page as standard text output. Although CGI applications can be written in almost any programming language, including C and C++, they are most commonly written in Perl—a language that combines the syntax of C with the text handling features of a number of popular Unix utilities (sed and awk, most notably).