Why perl cgi comobination?
CGI is simply a specification which defines a standard way for web servers to run CGI scripts. CGI can be sometimes defined as the mechanism that connects between computer programs and web server. It allows to provide a web interface to your program from a web browser and to get the output in a result page.
Perl is a very popular language for CGI scripting due to its following features:
1) Text handling ability
2) Easy scripting
3) High relative speed.
Setting up of CGI in Unix/Linux needs a web server called Apache server. In order to set up CGI on Windows, one should install the Internet Information Server (IIS).
Basic CGI scripts, either in perl or any other programming languages, use two types of texts:
a) The plain text (code)
b) HTML text (design or format)
As perl is a natural language, which can be embedded in other programming languages as well, one can use it to embed with web programming. When you learn perl for Bioinformatics, CGI is generally coded in Perl.
Creating Perl CGI scripts:
First Step:
CGI is the main program when you are going to create web pages. One can use text editor of that operating system for constructing CGI scripts (Notepad, Notepad++ or Dreamweaver).
Second Step:
This perl CGI program is then called by web server (Apache or IIS) in response to some action by the user.
Perl offers a very powerful feature of adding a module named as CGI.pm which is used to run CGI programs. This module has a collection of a pre-written perl code and you can also create bioinformatics modules as per your requirements.
CGI Perl Bioinformatics Applications:
In Bioinformatics, CGI Perl can be used in following ways:
- To create different kinds of online tools. For example in ORF Finder, it finds the ORFs present in a given query sequence.
- CGI programming can also be used to perform a database search online.
