Lynn Welge on Apple's personal web server

Apple announces their intention to support CGI extensions in their server software.

Subject:     CGI Support in Apple's PWS
Sent:        12/13/96 2:01 PM
Received:    12/13/96 3:14 PM
From:        Lynn Welge, welge@apple.com
To:          midas@biap.com
CC:          Lynn Welge, welge@apple.com

Folks,

Our Personal Web Server (PWS) team has been following your discussions about the importance of CGI support in the product. As you've heard, we had identified time to market for the basic product as a higher priority than CGI support. Based on your feedback, and similar input from our seed sites, we've just decided to change our plan.

We have decided to add CGI support as a feature in the first release of our Personal Web Server. As Larry Tesler pointed out in an earlier message, one of our goals has always been to create a platform for developer added value. Our primary concern was the time it might take for us to qualify the ever growing number of CGIs available, both commercially and for free. We didn't want to overcommit our test team, over and above making sure the core product works really well.

Based on early returns from our pre-Beta seed, and our own internal testing, we're cautiously optimistic that quality and performance are looking pretty decent.

We've also re-evaluated what it means to claim CGI support. Instead of Apple testing all widely available commercial and non-commercial CGI's before we ship, we'll encourage the CGI developers among you to test your code against our product and make your own compatibility claims. If we can do a bit of testing ourselves, and get quick turnaround on testing from you, the impact on the product schedule could be minimal.

So, over the next few days, the team will supply the current seeds and the MIDAS mailing list with what information is needed for their own CGI testing. (By the way, the current pre-beta software many of you are using does in fact have CGI support enabled already; we will follow up with some helpful sample AppleScript files for registering, monitoring, etc.)

Once again, thank you for providing us with exactly what we needed from you: timely, useful, rational, consistent input to make us all more successful.

Regards,

Lynn Welge

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