Today marks the first official day of CST 363, a Databases course taught with MySQL and Python 3. Because I am returning to work next week and because the professor posted our weekly work in advance, I made sure to get a head start to manage my time effectively. Therefore, I have already completed all of Week 1’s readings and the assignments.

I can remember the term CGI as far back as I started using the Internet back in the mid to late 90s on AOL. I recall seeing member pages with a directory named cgi-bin. Now I actually know what CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is and what the cgi-bin directory is for. A Common Gateway Interface allows webservers to execute applications and create webpages dynamically. The cgi-bin directory is the directory where such programs must be stored (on a webserver) in order to be executed correctly by the webserver.

This week, I was able to created a web-based form that simulating either a user attempting to login or to register on a server. First, I ran Python script (provided my the professor) that started an HTTP server on my local machine. An HTTP server allows you to access and HTML file on your browser via a GET request to that server:

127.0.0.1 - - [09/Jan/2019 18:02:09] "GET /login.html HTTP/1.1" 200 -

As previously mentioned, our assignment was to create a web-based form to allow a user to login or register. A user’s login information (userid and password) had to be checked against a MySQL database in order to determine if the credentials were valid for either registration (userid can’t already exist) or logging in (password must match for an existing userid).

The HTML <form> tag requires two attributes: action and method. The action is the name of a file or the name of a program the HTTP server should send form-data to. The method specifies whether the HTTP server should send the form-data with a GET or POST request. In this case, our web form sent a POST request encoding key-value pairs (userid: ‘your_user_id’ and password: ‘your_password’) to a Python 3 program that would use this data to authenticate the credentials (or insert in the case of valid registration) against our MySQL database.

127.0.0.1 - - [09/Jan/2019 18:53:04] "POST /cgi-bin/login.py HTTP/1.1" 200 -