Lessons Learned from CGIs with Perl
What is CGIs with Perl?
According to http://www.cgi101.com/learn/intro.html, "CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. CGI is one method by which a web server can obtain data from (or send data to) databases, documents, and other programs, and present that data to viewers via the web. More simply, a CGI is a program intended to be run on the web. A CGI program can be written in any programming language, but Perl is one of the most popular, and is the language we'll be using."
Hardware and Software Used for CGI-Perl
Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari are some of the web browsers' software that require to display this assignment. A free telnet program such as PuTTY is to telnet, login, and transfer your files in the server/network protocols, which can be downloaded at PuTTY. PuTTY is available for Windows and Unix-based systems.
Also, the hardware is a personal computer including a monitor or a laptop to access the web page.
Steps to Complete CGI-Perl
(1) Modifying an HTML page by using a free web template from http://www.csstemplateheaven.com/, (2) embedding JavaScript inside HTML document, (3) creating/modifying Perl scripts for the HTML page to obtain data and send data, (4) uploading the web page and perl scripts in the USF web server at myweb.usf.edu, (5) testing and modifying the JavaScript & Perl codes if needed.
Sample Screens
The user first needs to select an answer for each question and then press Submit button at the end of the page to get the quiz result. Next, there will 3 buttons available after submitting the answers.
Lessons Learned
My previous project in activity no. 4 deals with JavaScript. Even thought it works flawlessly, the information can be exposing to viewers. People can view the source codes by right-click and select on "View Source"; therefore, information is not hidden properly. In this assignment, I will use Perl along with JavaScript to encrypt and store user's inputs at the server end.
After performance activity no 4 and 5, I have reviewed and learned many new important aspects on how internet works, especially in information hiding, code representation (JavaScript) , and how client and server communicate (PERL). Please check out page http://hhngo.myweb.usf.edu/IntEd/act5/PerlScript.htm for the CGI-Perl activity.