What advantages do servlets have over CGI programs?
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Answer Posted / gunasekar
1. Efficient
With traditional CGI, a new process is started for each HTTP request. If the CGI program itself is relatively short, the overhead of starting the process can dominate the execution time. With servlets, the Java virtual machine stays running and handles each request with a lightweight Java thread, not a heavyweight operating system process.
2. Convenient
Servlets have an extensive infrastructure for automatically parsing and decoding HTML form data, reading and setting HTTP headers, handling cookies, tracking sessions, and many other such high-level utilities. In CGI, you have to do much of this yourself.Besides, if you already know the Java programming language, why learn Perl too?
3. Powerful
Servlets support several capabilities that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with regular CGI. Servlets can talk directly to the Web server, whereas regular CGI programs cannot, at least not without using a server-specific API.
4. Portable
Servlets are written in the Java programming language and follow a standard API and thus are portable themselves.
5. Inexpensive
A number of free or very inexpensive Web servers are good for development use or deployment of low- or medium-volume Web sites.This is in contrast to many of the other CGI alternatives,
which require a significant initial investment for the purchase of a proprietary package.
6. Secure
One of the main sources of vulnerabilities in traditional CGI stems from the fact that the programs are often executed by general-purpose operating system shells. So, the CGI programmer must be careful to filter out characters such as backquotes and semicolons that are treated specially by the shell. Implementing this precaution is
harder than one might think, and weaknesses stemming from this problem are constantly being uncovered in widely used CGI libraries.
A second source of problems is the fact that some CGI programs are processed by languages that do not automatically check array or string bounds. Servlets suffer from neither of these problems. Even if a servlet executes a system call (e.g., with Runtime.exec or JNI) to invoke a program on the local operating system, it does not use a shell to do so. And, of course, array bounds checking and other memory protection features are a central part of the Java programming
language.
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