I wrote a web application in an internship, circa 2011. I had no existing platform/framework to work with, no mentorship (the team wasn't really prepared to support an intern), and most importantly, an Apache web server running in Cygwin, with no PHP runtime installed. No one as much as told me what language I'd be writing at this job.
The Web development I'd done up to that point consisted of raw HTML/CSS, with some ASP.NET or PHP running on the backend. I'd never written a line of JavaScript in my life.
It was at this point that I "discovered" a winning combination: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in the user's browser. The backend was a set of C# applications which wrote to standard out, which could be invoked directly by Apache's mod_cgi, since C# compiles down to Windows executables. There were countless better other solutions at this point - ASP.NET/PHP (as I'd already used). FastCGI, WSGI, and others were all a thing at this point, but I'd never heard of them.
I outputted a JavaScript object (I had no idea what JSON was at the time, or that I was effectively outputting it) and read it back into the browser using a thin wrapper around XMLHttpRequest. I then iterated over the outputm and transformed the data into tables. JQuery was a thing at that point, but likewise, I'd never heard of it.
Say what you will about the job, the team, the mentorship (or lack theorof) - it took them three months before they realized I'd written C# at a Java shop, and at that point the thing was already being used widely across engineering.
The important takeaway here was, that "winning combination" of some minimal JavaScript and CGI was the perfect ratio of simple, approachable, and powerful, to enable me to finish the task at hand, and in a way that (at least until anybody saw the architecture) everybody was thrilled with. It didn't require a deeper understanding of a framework to bootstrap it from nothing. Write an HTTP response to standard out, formatted as an object, and you were on your way.
electroglyph · 52m ago
OpenResty + Lua ftw
lemcoe9 · 35m ago
Absolutely. For me, OpenResty combined with a custom Lua script solved an incredibly complicated business problem that I ran into a couple years ago, and now that arrangement serves thousands of complex requests per day. With Nginx and that custom code combined into a single configuration, not requiring a separate backend service, we turned a complicated problem into a very simple one!
doublerabbit · 2h ago
eBay confused the 17 year old me back in 2007 when their listings were powered by a dll file.
cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll
It wasn't for many years later that I discovered knowledge about CGI.
treyd · 1h ago
I never did understand why this path/file structure was exposed.
immibis · 1h ago
Same reason https://foo.example/bar/baz.html exposes it - it tells the web server which file to access. Cool, customized routing wasn't always a thing.
The Web development I'd done up to that point consisted of raw HTML/CSS, with some ASP.NET or PHP running on the backend. I'd never written a line of JavaScript in my life.
It was at this point that I "discovered" a winning combination: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in the user's browser. The backend was a set of C# applications which wrote to standard out, which could be invoked directly by Apache's mod_cgi, since C# compiles down to Windows executables. There were countless better other solutions at this point - ASP.NET/PHP (as I'd already used). FastCGI, WSGI, and others were all a thing at this point, but I'd never heard of them.
I outputted a JavaScript object (I had no idea what JSON was at the time, or that I was effectively outputting it) and read it back into the browser using a thin wrapper around XMLHttpRequest. I then iterated over the outputm and transformed the data into tables. JQuery was a thing at that point, but likewise, I'd never heard of it.
Say what you will about the job, the team, the mentorship (or lack theorof) - it took them three months before they realized I'd written C# at a Java shop, and at that point the thing was already being used widely across engineering.
The important takeaway here was, that "winning combination" of some minimal JavaScript and CGI was the perfect ratio of simple, approachable, and powerful, to enable me to finish the task at hand, and in a way that (at least until anybody saw the architecture) everybody was thrilled with. It didn't require a deeper understanding of a framework to bootstrap it from nothing. Write an HTTP response to standard out, formatted as an object, and you were on your way.
The eBay example, by the way, is ISAPI, not CGI.
3.3M LoC C++, that must have been quite painful.