Under the Hood - Web Servers

A web server is a program on a computer that knows how to communicate with web browsers. The web server uses a web directory for storing files. Only files contained in the public web directory are accessible by web browsers.

A computer with a web browser (Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, etc...) can ask your web server to give a web pages that is stored on the web server. The web server then sends the web browser the HTML code, which the web browser displays on the screen.

When a web browser submits a form, it contacts the web server and giving it the encoded form data. The web server starts a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program that will receive the data that the browser sent. This CGI program (created by EZSurvey) saves the form data to a tab delimited text file on the web server's hard drive.

In order to browse and analyze the form responses EZSurvey needs to downloads the tab delimited text file from the server.

As a courtesy to our customers, we provide ANSI-C source code for the EZSurvey CGI that will compile on UNIX and Windows platforms. Should you desire to write your own web scripts, you may wish to use these as a starting point. You may not distribute them (either as source code or compiled) without written permission from Raosoft, Inc.

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