From: Justin White <just6979@...>
Date: 2003-05-24T05:43:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Naive CGI question

Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> It's not entirely obvious to me that
> a web server is needed to run a CGI
> that is *on the local machine*. (As,
> by analogy, we don't need to run a 
> server just to look at local static
> HTML files.)
> 
> 
> So, a serverless CGI -- possible in
> theory and practice, in theory only,
> or just not happening?
> 
> 
> Hal

with CGI, the HTTP server simply runs the script, providing it with 
environment variables (the global ENV hash in Ruby). the variables (see 
http://tin.2t.net/scripts/envlist.rb for an example) contain the 
requested URL, including all the stuff after the ? in GETs and including 
all the sent data in POSTs. the script then operates on this data and 
its output is then sent by the server to the browser.

both Perl's CGI.pm and Ruby's cgi.rb recognize when they're not being 
run via a server and ask for the information, dumping the output to 
stdout. while you can save that output into a file and view it, it's 
definitely more work that just typing a URL.

have you considered running a server locally? Apache needs only a few 
configuration changes to be able to run Ruby scripts as CGIs (none if 
give them .cgi extensions, IIRC), and it's free ;)

or perhaps someone would like to create a little Ruby app to answer http 
requests,fill out the ENV, and run a script. run `minicgi.rb 
somescript.rb` and point a browser at http://localhost/?cgidata=goeshere 
(where somescript.rb is the CGI script you want to test)

-Justin