A report on Common Gateway Interface, Form (HTML) and PHP

The official CGI logo from the spec announcement
Sample form. The form is enclosed in an HTML table for visual layout.
Registration form of PHP-based e-commerce web-shop software ZenCart
This is an example of PHP code for the WordPress content management system.
The elePHPant, PHP mascot
A "Hello World" application in PHP 7.4 running on its built-in development server
Example output of the phpinfo function in PHP 7.1
A broad overview of the LAMP software bundle, displayed here together with Squid
Dynamic web page: example of server-side scripting (PHP and MySQL)

A typical use case occurs when a web user submits a web form on a web page that uses CGI.

- Common Gateway Interface

PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable.

- PHP

He extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases, and called this implementation "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.

- PHP

Some of the interpreted languages commonly used to design interactive forms in web development are PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, JSP, Adobe ColdFusion and some of the compiled languages commonly used are Java and C# with ASP.NET.

- Form (HTML)

Perl scripts are traditionally used as Common Gateway Interface applications (CGIs).

- Form (HTML)

CGI programs precompiled to machine code, e.g. precompiled from C or C++ programs, rather than CGI programs interpreted by a virtual machine, e.g. Perl, PHP or Python programs.

- Common Gateway Interface
The official CGI logo from the spec announcement

1 related topic with Alpha

Overall
PC clients communicating via network with a web server serving static content only.

Web server

0 links

Computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP or its secure variant HTTPS.

Computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP or its secure variant HTTPS.

PC clients communicating via network with a web server serving static content only.
The inside and front of a Dell PowerEdge server, a computer designed to be mounted in a rack mount environment. It is often used as a web server.
Multiple web servers may be used for a high traffic website.
Web server farm with thousands of web servers used for super-high traffic websites.
ADSL modem running an embedded web server serving dynamic web pages used for modem configuration.
First web proposal (1989) evaluated as "vague but exciting..."
The world's first web server, a NeXT Computer workstation with Ethernet, 1990. The case label reads: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
Sun's Cobalt Qube 3 – a computer server appliance (2002, discontinued)
PC clients connected to a web server via Internet
PC clients communicating via network with a web server serving static and dynamic content.
Directory listing dynamically generated by a web server.
Chart: Market share of all sites for most popular web servers 2005–2021
Chart: Market share of all sites for most popular web servers 1995–2005

At the beginning of 1994, the most notable among new web servers was NCSA httpd which ran on a variety of Unix-based OSs and could serve dynamically generated content by implementing the HTTP method and the CGI to communicate with external programs.

These capabilities, along with the multimedia features of NCSA's Mosaic browser (also able to manage HTML FORMs in order to send data to web server) highlighted the potential of web technology for publishing and distributed computing applications.

The result is the local file path of the program (in this example, a PHP program):