Web programming in C question.

In ruby on rails, you can send requests to certain functions of the program depending on what the URL is, and you can put information to send to the function in the URL. For example...

.com/profile/18

In one program, that request could be sent to the view profile function, and the 18 can be sent as the ID of the profile to view.

I believe you can also do this same thing with Java servlets. Is there anything that will do this with CGI programs in C? Something that allows me to route request that I want, but will still allow Apache to handle the request that I don't want to handle?

The routing to different functions part isn't so important, I more want to be able to put information into the URL.

Thank you.

Yes you can do this, but not as a CGI program. For this, you would want to write an Apache module and hook to the URI Translation event or Header Parsing event and then you can work from there. Note that an apache module works way faster than a CGI does. Matter of fact, it is often faster than serving a static page!

IIS has a similar feature where you can write an ISAPI dll which can hook to the event and work from there.

After I posted this I started reading about Apache modules, but I was hoping I wouldn't have to write one. Well at least now I know where I gotta start. Thanks!