Renegade — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 07:47:44 +0000

funny, I always thought that CGI was PHP because when I look through some hosting sites they say ASP support and PHP Support, I guess it's not always so good to assume ... :S

Suzanne — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 02:39:13 +0000

CGI is not a language, it's a concept. CGI scripts are usually (but not always) written in Perl. When you fiddle with CGI, you're likely fiddling with Perl.

CF is a markup language that masks server-side processing. It's main advantage is that someone else has done all the hard work and you just use the tags.

PHP/ASP/JSP are embedded server-side languages, meaning you can put them right into the page, and have HTML mixed in with generated code in the same place, instead of templates and other harder-to-troubleshoot options in Perl and Java (which are purely server-side and output based on the script and everything has to be inside it).

The advantage of this is nested includes, and the ability to restructure how a page works very very easily.

Of course you can use SSI to approximate this with CGI/Perl, but it is fairly limited and cumbersome by comparison.