CGI, Servlets, and the Kitchen Sink Oh My!

In the heady days of the internet boom legions of wannabe millionaires were wearing their fingers thin late in to the night programming server-side programs to dynamically create reams upon reams of web pages. They'd spend months creating wonders of modern engeenering such as web-based dog-food stores, internet gambling casinos, and, of-course, hot-or-not. As these legions marched to the beat of the mighty dollar, through their sheer numbers they created a certain momentum. This momentum in turn generated the spoils of a flood of technologies, the vast majority of which focused upon dynamically creating web pages. The most popular of these technologies were CGI and Servlets. As web services, late in the year 2000, seemed to be the next manna from heaven in the line of barnburners which defined the internet boom, it seemed only logical that web services should build upon the foundation layed by last week's internet godsend, CGI and Servlets. This, in fact, is the exactly the arc which the web services skyrocket took.

The technologies which fuled the engines of CGI and Servlets were harnessed to feed the fires of the web service booster engines. The majority of web services which exist today are fuled by this same petrol. A request from a client to call a particular method with particular parameters will be sent to a server. The server will in turn run a CGI program or a Servlet which will deal with the minutia of the message format and such, then call the method and return the result to the client. As the droves of millionaire wannabes had layed a solid CGI/Servlet foundation, whipping-up such a means to call remote methods was simple as 1-2-3.