This may sound a little pedantic, but the benefit of CGI over ASP is that you can execute a program and send submitted form data to it. The benefit of CGI over Perl is exactly the same - except you're using Perl rather than ASP. PHP, ASP, Perl, Bash, etc, all use the CGI.

This rather quaint definition (not updated since 1999 explains the core idea. If you read the specs (and I do think it is worth it - to gain a better understanding of what the CGI actually is), you'll see that it basically says what environment variables get set by the server when processing an HTTP request through the CGI. I'd also recommend you read up on HTTP - if only so that when things go wrong you'll have a pretty good idea where to look first.

Whether you should use Perl or ASP is up to you. What have you used before? If a server hasn't been bought yet, which do you feel more comfortable working on? If not Windows, ASP is a silly option. Is budget an issue? Perl can score there if you also feel comfortable with Apache - especially if on *nix.

In reply to Re: CGI vs ASP by cLive ;-)
in thread CGI vs ASP by Anonymous Monk

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