Flight Comparison Website - Is CGI the only option?

Could Javascript perform similar functionality?

[G00gleFan]

Dear all,

I am very new to e-commerce so my question might sound stupid to some. I want to develop (or at least try) a website that obtains flight information (i.e. availability, pricing etc) and if a flight is available, the user is redirected to the 'parent' website to book the flight. Although there is a plethora of websites doing just that, a very good example I found is:

[edit]Please No URLs[/edit]

To see what I mean, you can use the 'Flight finder' option on the left, enter something like 'munich' for destination and click on find. The next page is what I am talking about. The icons on the right that correspond to flight availability have statuses like connecting, checking availability, not available or available etc.

I can see that the website is using CGI to perform this dynamic check. My question is: is it possible to perform similar functionality by *just* using Javascript? Spend hours looking for tutorials online and offline that might explain something on that, but no luck. Maybe its not possible after all?

Thanks in advance

[edited by: minnapple at 9:21 pm (utc) on Mar. 8, 2006]

[stajer]

If you mean could a client side language like javascript do this, probably not. Using js to retrieve info from multiple websites then parse the info would be difficult. Plus, you would have to dl the entire code to clients browser - slow and you ar giving up your entire ip.

A server side language like asp, cgi or php is best suited for this type of application.