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Difference between cgi and webservice

Can anyone tell me the main differences between CGI app and webservice. I've searched search terms but haven't found any better answers.

I just know the CGI was found earlier than the webservice.

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CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a way that web servers can launch external applications (and pass additional information to the application) to provide dynamic content.

A web service is also a kind of dynamic content and can be implemented using CGI applications (or similar techniques). However, for web services, the content is machine readable (XML) and must follow a strict specification. Thus, web services tend to be automatically used by other programs.



The general idea of ​​CGI is still used today, but it has some drawbacks (for example, a new application must be launched on the server for every request). It is more common nowadays to use modules / plugins loaded into a web server that handle script execution (e.g. mod-php, mod-perl - there the parser is loaded once and just has to execute the requested scripts).

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CGI and Web Server APIs The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) was introduced as a standard protocol for extending the functionality of web servers with additional applications. Most CGI applications are simple executables that run every time they are requested. ColdFusion uses a more robust architecture. The ColdFusion Application Server acts as a multi-threaded system service and handles all the complex processing. The application server communicates with the web server either through a very small CGI executable called a stub (cfml.exe) or through the web server's own API.

As web servers evolved, each vendor introduced and implemented an application programming interface (API) for their server. Native web server APIs offer additional functionality and significantly improve performance. Instead of running the CGI executable, the servers that support the API communicate directly with the ColdFusion application server through a DLL.

In addition to implementing server APIs, many server vendors have created a document type mapping so that individual document extensions can be process-related. This allows you to create ColdFusion application pages that are stored directly in the root directory of your web server.

ColdFusion supports the following core web server APIs:



  • Netscape API (NSAPI)
  • Internet server
  • API (ISAPI)
  • Website API (WSAPI)
  • Apache API

These APIs and document type mapping are supported by these servers:

  • Netscape Enterprise and FastTrack servers.
  • Microsoft IIS (all versions)
  • WebSite (1.1 and Pro)
  • Apache
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