Understanding Web Services

[Jonathan Wood]

I'm looking into implementing Web services to provide product activation
codes to resellers. This seems to be going fine.

One large reseller tells me they support CGI for this purpose, as thought
it's the same as Web services. Clearly, CGI is not the same as a Web
service, but reading about it, it seems similar in that it somehow calls
code running on my server.

Can anyone clarify for me the primary differences between CGI and Web
services? Specifically, can a CGI interface be implemented using ASP.NET, or
could a Web service be made to work by code that calls CGI?

Thanks!

Jonathan

 

[bruce barker]

cgi is method for a url to specify a program to run, either a binary or
a scripting language like perl, ruby or python. a cgi program can call a
webservice or act as a webservice, just depends on how its coded. often
cgi programs expect a xml post and return xml, sometimes they do form
post, just depends.

 

[Jonathan Wood]

Thanks, can you tell me what, if any, support ASP.NET has to implement a CGI
interface?

Thanks.