I notice that small, static, brochure sites would often benefit from adding forms to let users (un)subscribe to an event or mailing list but this means installing some application in the web server referenced in the "action" attribute in HTML forms.
To make it easier to install + prevent users from sharing this program, ideally, I'd like to write this as a stand-alone binary application with some kind of anti-piracy protection that will good enough to stop casual users (I know, any program can be cracked), and be able to run with any web server. I guess CGI is the answer, since it's not tied to a specific web server API.
If you are used to writing cross-platform applications to run behind a web server, what language and tools would you recommend? Performance is not an issue, since this is just to display a form and save the data into an SQLite database. I am concerned that users may not have execution rights for a binary in the document root of web sites on shared, hosted servers.
Thank you for any feedback.