When a user keys a url into a browser, a request is created that goes to a server. Depending on the request, the server’s response may be in the form of static HTML pages that are stored on the server or dynamic content that is compiled from various sources.

Up to now, the most common way of generating dynamic content was through the Common Gateway Interface, CGI for short. CGI programs (typically written in C or Perl) interact with the user by reading the user’s input, HTML forms, and returning custom HTML pages. But CGI has a drawback: for each user request, the CGI script must be loaded, run, and unloaded. This is inefficient.

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