Overview

You've got a Web site. You want dynamic content. That particular buzzword means that the content your site presents to an individual user changes either with the passage of time or depending on the identity of the person accessing it. A good example would be a newspaper Web site, where the top story changes when there's breaking news, and the site might also allow users to customize their view of the site so that only tech stories are presented. You don't get dynamic content by having HyperText Markup Language (HTML) coders sitting at terminals 24/7 frantically editing the pages to include only the stories the current users want.

Once you've got a good and recognizable page layout, you don't want to keep messing with it. Hand-editing pages to change the top story is inefficient and error prone. (And, conversely, when you do change your page layout, you want to change it across the whole application, not page by page.)

You could write CGI programs in any language that has a database connection Perl, C, Python, server-side Java, Visual BASIC, DCL on VMS using command-line utilities for the database lookup, whatever to do this work. The trick, basically, is that the browser doesn't know where the content comes from. So long as it gets a stream of text that looks like proper HTML, the browser doesn't care how many programs it took to produce it; whether it was in a file or generated in real time; or what computer language, operating system,...