Error passing control to CGI

Question

I am using the following peice of code to pass data and control to a CGI program residing in the same directory as the applet.
try { postscores = new URL(s); }
catch ( MalformedURLException ee) {
          System.out.println("Bad URL: " + postscores);
getAppletContext().showDocument(postscores, "_self");
I am using the following piece of code to pass data and control from a Java applet to a CGI program residing in the same directory as the applet.
I am using a string that looks like:http://www.research.avi/result.cgi?r1=9&r2=10
Sometimes the CGI does not start. Looks like the applet is trying again and again to pass the data using
This happens only on several computers and on others it looks OK.
Can anyone help please.

Answer 1

I'd suggest testing on a variety of browsers, and checking against your web server log, to first determine whether there's a pattern among browsers, etc.
Does the same applet on all browsers cause your browser to request the same URL correctly? Or is it that, as far as your web server sees it, sometimes the URL is mangled, or the URL is simply not even requested?
Is the URL mangled or not requested when using certain browsers? If so, which ones? etc. The first thing you want to determine is where the problem is occurring -- client, server, or both.
Another potential problem is that your applet is mangling the URL in some circumstances. When you test, make sure you do the identical tests in all browsers -- you don't want to accidentally identify an applet bug as a browser bug.
If your web server logs suggest that the URLs are always being accessed correctly, the problem must be in the CGI. If sometimes the URL is not being accessed correctly, then the problem could be in your applet or some browsers.
It looks like you're implementing your CGI with Perl. If the problem is in the CGI, you'll need to go to a different forum for help. I'm not sure which forums there are out there for perl CGI these days. I believe there's a comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi newsgroup. I would recommend that you consider using the CGI.pm module rather than parsing the query string input yourself, if that's what you're doing.