The primary Web mission for the House is to provide a secure, reliable environment to host Member and Committee Web sites. It is imperative that the CAO maintain control over the development and deployment of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts to succeed in this mission. Incorrectly written CGI scripts may subject Web servers to performance degradation, denial of service or security risks. In turn, these risks would threaten all sites hosted on the server. CGI scripts will be reviewed for accuracy before being installed. All CGI scripts which run on CAO-maintained Web servers must be installed and maintained by CAO staff.
House Web site managers should discuss their CGI requirements with Web Solutions prior to developing any server side scripts. The table below displays the process Web Solutions will follow when evaluating scripts. For the text version of this process see items 1 through 3 below the table.
Does a similar Web Solutions script exist? |
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No | Yes | ||
Is such a script useful to all House Web sites? | Web Solutions will help the office use existing scripts. | ||
Yes | No | ||
Are there sufficient resources available within CAO to create a new script? | |||
Yes | No | ||
CAO will develop, test and deploy the new script. | |||
Office may develop script themselves or through vendors. |
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. An industry standard for browser interactivity.
An Executable Directory is a directory on a web server where CGI scripts are installed. Only CAO staff can maintain executable directories. Individual House office web directories on CAO-maintained servers are configured to be non-executable.