How Do Scripting Languages Work?
In its simplest form, a server-side scripting language is a language whose primary goal is to output HTML. Remember that the simplest browser request is one in which a URL is sent to the Web server and the server returns the contents of a static Web page. Simple and effective, this sort of interaction drove the first generation of Web sites. Scripting languages, however, are used for dynamic Web sites. A dynamic Web page is one in which the data displayed to the user is a mixture of static information (such as logos and basic formatting) and dynamic business data retrieved from the host at run time. So scripting languages are tools used to dynamically generate the HTML for a Web page from data on the host. The industry term for calling a scripting program is CGI, or Common Gateway Interface. CGI defines a specific protocol by which the HTTP server invokes the CGI program to generate the Web page. And even this definition has two primary subcategories: macro-based languages and general-
