Earlier, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) was the only tool for developing dynamic web content and was not very efficient. The web server has to create a new operating system process, load an interpreter and a script, execute the script, and then tear it all down again, for every request that comes in. This is taxing for the server and doesn’t scale well when the number of traffic increases.
Alternatives such as ISAPI from Microsoft, and Java Servlets from Sun Microsystems, offer better performance and scalability. However, they generate web pages by embedding HTML directly in programming language code. JavaServer Pages (JSP) changes all of that.
