The phenomenal growth that the World Wide Web (WWW) service currently experiences, necessitates the adaptation of legacy information systems like RDBMSs or full-text search systems to HTTP servers. Existing standards for performing this adaptation (i.e. CGI), although well-established, prove highly inefficient throughout periods of heavy load (multiple hits per unit time). In this paper, after reviewing all the relevant mechanisms, we propose a generic architecture which adheres to the existing standards and client/server model and alleviates the performance handicap of classical database gateways. The performance evaluation which was realised as part of this research effort revealed a noteworthy superiority of the proposed architecture with respect to monolithic (non-client/server) CGI based approaches.