Add a mini project to copy the fcgi_config.h file from fcgi_config_x86.h
[catagits/fcgi2.git] / README
CommitLineData
0198fd3c 1FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2------------------------------
3
33977e3b 4 $Id: README,v 1.13 2001/12/12 14:12:27 robs Exp $
0198fd3c 5 Copyright (c) 1996 Open Market, Inc.
6 See the file "LICENSE.TERMS" for information on usage and redistribution
7 of this file, and for a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES.
8
9Basic Directions
10----------------
11
1856131a 12Unix:
0198fd3c 13
1856131a 14 ./configure
15 make
16 make install
0198fd3c 17
1856131a 18Win32:
0198fd3c 19
1856131a 20 nmake -f Makefile.nt
fbf75401 21
1856131a 22 (or use the MSVC++ project files in the Win32 directory)
ac8a58ac 23
1856131a 24
25CHANGES
26-------
27
28Unfortunately documentation of many of the changes have been lost.
29
48f63bdf 302.2.3
31-----
32
33977e3b 33 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
34 when an error occured on a read
35
fae4909b 36 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
37
48f63bdf 38 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
39 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
40
1856131a 41
422.2.2
43-----
44
45 *) Added support for shared libraries.
46
47 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
48
49 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
50
51 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
52
53 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
54
55
56Changes with devkit 2.1.1
ac8a58ac 57-------------------------
f6d1be39 58
6518a3ef 59 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
60 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
61
3293ebdf 62 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
63
da7d42b2 64 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
65
283822e9 66 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
67
5a7cc494 68 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
6518a3ef 69 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
5a7cc494 70 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
71
fbf75401 72 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
73
f6d1be39 74 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
fbf75401 75 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
76
ac8a58ac 77 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
fbf75401 78
ac8a58ac 79 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
fbf75401 80
0198fd3c 81
82What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
83--------------------------------------
84
85Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
86of the bugs that have been and fixed:
87 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
88 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
89 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
fbf75401 90 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
0198fd3c 91 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
92 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
93 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
94 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
95 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
96 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
97 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
98 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
99 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
fbf75401 100 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
101 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
0198fd3c 102 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
103 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
104 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
105 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
fbf75401 106
0198fd3c 107
108What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
109--------------------------------------
110
111This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
112Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
fbf75401 113running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
0198fd3c 114provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
115 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
116 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
117 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
118 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
119
120
121What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
122--------------------------------------
123
124This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
fbf75401 125functionality to the kit.
0198fd3c 126 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
127 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
128 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
fbf75401 129 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
0198fd3c 130 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
fbf75401 131
0198fd3c 132
133What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
134--------------------------------------
135
136General:
137
138 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
139 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
140
141 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
142 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
143 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
144 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
145 and Apache.)
146
147 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
148 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
149
150 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
151 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
152 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
153 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
154 not fatal.
155
156C libraries:
157
158 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
159 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
160 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
161 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
162 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
163 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
164 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
165 the use of FCGI_Finish.
166
167 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
168 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
169 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
170
171 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
172 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
173 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
174
175 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
176 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
177 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
178 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
179 than one address or if the address check failed.
180
181 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
182 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
183 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
184 Mahoney).
185
186 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
187 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
188 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
189 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
190 be attempted.
191
192Perl:
193
194 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
195 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
196 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
197 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
198 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
199 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
200 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
201 first line of a command interpreter file.
202
203 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
204 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
205 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
206
207Tcl:
208
209 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
210 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
211 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
212 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
213 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
214 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
215 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
216 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
217 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
218 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
219
220 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
221 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
222 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
223
224Java:
225
226 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
227 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
228 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
229 consistent with the other examples.
230
231
232
233What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
234--------------------------------------
235
236Includes Java classes and Java examples.
237
238
239
240What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
241--------------------------------------
242
243New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
244describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
245Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
246"FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
247presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
248Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
249France.
250
251
252
253What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
254--------------------------------------
255
256First public release; new license terms on all files.
257
258Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
259this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
260connections made by the previous instance of an external application
fbf75401 261you are restarting.
0198fd3c 262
263
264
265What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
266----------------------------------------
267
268Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
269The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
270per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
271the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
272variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
273when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
274AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
275environment.
276
277
278
279What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
280----------------------------------------
281
282Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
283opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
284was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
285
286Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
287listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
288with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
289
290
291
292What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
293--------------------------------------
294
2951. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
296of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
297a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
298and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
299end-of-stream indication.
300
301The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
302been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
303introduce in later releases.
304
305At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
306variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
307to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
308application can be written to respond in several roles. The
309FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
310
3112. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
312the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
313
314A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
315fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
316naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
317bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
318primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
319FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
320two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
321
322The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
323FCGI_accept.
324
325The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
326lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
327modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
328
3293. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
330and Filter roles.
331
332The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
333FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
334FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
335gives full details.
336
337Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
338the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
339allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
340before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
341The manpage gives full details.
342
343These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
344and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
345called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
346
3474. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
348the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
349
350FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
351a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
352FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
353FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
354file for complete information.
355
356fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
357test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
358
3595. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
360on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
361selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
362running configure.
363
364
365
366What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
367------------------------------------
368
3691. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
370Sun SunOS 4.1.4.
371
3722. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
373interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
374code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
375in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
376
377
378
379Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
380------------------------