Bridging the gap between CGI and server APIs in WWW database gateways

Hadjiefthymiades S., Martakos D. and Varouxis I.
TR99-0003
February 20, 1999

The impressive boost that the WWW has received and its popularity have turned this soft-ware platform to a very important candidate for the deployment of various kinds of client/server appli-cations in the Internet as well as corporate intranets. An area where the WWW technology had consid-erable impact in the recent past is the area of DBMS applications. The existing CGI standard for inter-facing DBMSs and WWW servers although well-established, proves highly inefficient throughout peri-ods of heavy load. In this paper, after reviewing the gateway standard and other similar proprietary specifications and summarising their pros and cons we propose a generic gateway architecture which adheres to the existing standard and client/server model but manages to overcome the identified per-formance disadvantage. We quantify the benefits of this new architecture through a series of experi-ments in which we emulate the traffic caused by a gradually increasing number of HTTP users. The ar-chitecture is compared against monolithic CGI solutions and solutions based on the Netscape Server API (NSAPI) proprietary specification. The experiments have shown that the proposed architecture performs significantly better than conventional CGI gateways. We have also proved that the measured performance is comparable to that accomplished through the NSAPI specification. [Article] [Web Archive link]