Deploying Your Applications on the Web Using CGI

To deploy your applications on the Web using CGI, you perform the following steps:

  1. Create a Web interface to your application, targeted for your intended environment. Include pointers to the CGI program that you will develop. See Creating a Web Interface.
  2. Write a CGI program in COBOL that will read CGI variables, perform the processing task or launch a separate program to do so, and generate output from the results. Note that ACUCOBOL-GT has been designed to make CGI programming easy. See Writing a CGI Program.
  3. Create a runtime configuration file for your CGI program. In it, define input and output requirements, such as output content type, headers, caching, and stripping carriage returns. See Creating a Runtime Configuration File for Your CGI Program.
  4. Place your CGI program and ACUCOBOL-GT application on the Web server, along with the necessary configuration, license, and data files.
  5. Configure your Web server software. Have it run the program with the f runtime option or set the A_CGI environment variable to 1. This tells the runtime to run in CGI mode and not perform user interface functions. If your program will be running on UNIX, also specify the -b option. See Configuring the Web Server.
  6. Follow normal procedures for creating the license files for Windows and UNIX environments. If you ordered a CGI license file, see Running Your Programs.