Suppose you want customers or users to be able to run your applications by clicking a link on your Web site, but you do not want to require anything special of the user's machine (for instance, you do not want to require the user to have a copy of the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime). In this case, you have the option to create a new interface to your application using HyperText Markup Language. With an HTML interface, your application can be interpreted directly by the user's browser, and the processing logic can remain in COBOL on the Web server.
In this situation, you create your HTML interface using one of many popular HTML authoring tools. Then you write a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program that can read CGI variables submitted by the client to the server. This program can launch your COBOL application and can be a COBOL program itself. You can write it using ACUCOBOL-GT or any other language you choose. If you write the CGI program in ACUCOBOL-GT, you do not have to UNSTRING the CGI variables in the program, because ACUCOBOL-GT takes care of this through its "external-form" syntax.
After you build an HTML front end and write your CGI program, you set up a Web site with a link to the CGI program. Your customers or users can then visit your Web site and use their browser as the front end for your COBOL application running on the server.
For more information about any of these options, please refer to the separate Acucorp book titled A Programmer's Guide to the Internet.