There are 2 general approaches to dynamic web content:

• Farm your needs out to an external program. CGI and ISAPI are two protocols that support this approach.
• Build an interpreter into your web server. PHP and mod_perl are two examples of this.

CGI is the simplest approach, but as it launches a separate process for each request and can be inefficient in high traffic environments.

ISAPI, PHP and mod_perl are faster but run in the same process space as the web server.

FastCGI may be a good compromise if CGI is too burdensome.