Common Gateway Interface in GlassFish

Tuesday Jul 15, 2008

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) supports dynamic contents in web environment. CGI programs are executable programs in the server platform with specific output. It can be a Bourne shell script, Perl script or even a C binary executable. It was very popular before the the appearance of Servlet, JSP and PHP. The CGI code in GlassFish workspace is based on Tomcat. In GlassFish v3, CGI will be a supported feature. Let us look at a very simple example.

Create a CGI script

In our example, we have a simple Perl program, hello, to print a hello message and the timestamp of the server.

    #!/bin/perl
    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
    print "Hello World: ";
    print scalar localtime;
    print "\n";

Enabling CGI processing and packaging the war file

The CGI processing can be enabled in a war file by adding CGIServlet et al in web.xml as follows:

  <web-app>
    <servlet>
      <servlet-name>cgi</servlet-name>
      <servlet-class>org.apache.catalina.servlets.CGIServlet</servlet-class>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
      <servlet-name>cgi</servlet-name>
      <url-pattern>/cgi-bin/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
  </web-app>

In this case, one need to package the hello under the default cgiPathPrefix which is WEB-INF/cgi. For security, it is highly recommended that the contents / binaries of CGI programs should be prohibited from direct viewing or download.

Alternatively, one can enable CGI by uncommenting the corresponding sections in default-web.xml.

In our case, the CGI program can be invoked through http://localhost:8080/YOUR_CONTEXT/cgi-bin/hello .

Configuration of CGIServlet

One can configure CGIServlet by specifying the init-param as follows:

init-param	Type	Description	Default
cgiPathPrefix	String	subdirectory containing the cgi programs	WEB-INF/cgi
debug	int	debug level	0 (no debug)
executable	String	executable for running the CGI script	perl
parameterEncoding	String	encoding use for parameter	System.getProperty("file.encoding", "UTF-8")
passShellEnvironment	boolean	whether to pass environment properties to CGI program	false

CGI with native executables

GlassFish v3 CGI can work with native executables as follows:

• set the init-param with name executable to be the empty String in web.xml
• has exploded directory structure for the war in a directory, say /export/cgitest
• make sure those executables has the executable bits set correctly
• deploy the "directory" (not the "war"), for instance
  asadmin deploy /export/cgitest

Note that one works with the exploded directory structure rather than war file as the executable bits information is lost during the process of jar and unjar.

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Posted at 11:25AM Jul 15, 2008 by swchan in Sun
Tags: cgi glassfish