It is important that the readers grasps - since the beginning - the idea of what a CGI program is.

A CGI program is somehow different from a traditional AS/400 interactive program inasmuch it

• is transaction oriented, that is, it performs a single request and ends
• is stateless, that is, every time it processes a new transaction, it has no memory of what happened in the past

We suggest that the reader, before proceeding, spends some time reading the following article (this article was originally written for an RPG audience, but its concepts fully apply also to a COBOL audience).