1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.17 2002/02/24 20:12:21 robs Exp $
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.
22 (or use the MSVC++ project files in the Win32 directory)
28 For more detail regarding changes, please consult the cvs log available
29 on http://fastcgi.com/.
34 *) Use streamsize and char_type in the C++ API.
36 *) [WIN32] Eliminate the (partial and broken) use of OverlappedIO - this
37 was causing a loose spin in acceptNamedPipe().
39 *) Fix a bug that caused an assert to pop when an async file descriptor was
40 numbered greater than 16. Kevin Eye [eye@buffalo.edu]
42 *) Update the echo-cpp example to show the restoral of the original
43 streambufs. Trub, Vladimir [vtrub@purolator.com]
45 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
46 when an error occured on a read
48 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
50 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
51 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
57 *) Added support for shared libraries.
59 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
61 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
63 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
65 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
68 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
69 -------------------------
71 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
72 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
74 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
76 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
78 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
80 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
81 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
82 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
84 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
86 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
87 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
89 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
91 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
94 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
95 --------------------------------------
97 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
98 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
99 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
100 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
101 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
102 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
103 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
104 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
105 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
106 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
107 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
108 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
109 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
110 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
111 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
112 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
113 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
114 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
115 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
116 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
117 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
120 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
121 --------------------------------------
123 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
124 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
125 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
126 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
127 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
128 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
129 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
130 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
133 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
134 --------------------------------------
136 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
137 functionality to the kit.
138 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
139 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
140 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
141 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
142 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
145 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
146 --------------------------------------
150 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
151 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
153 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
154 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
155 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
156 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
159 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
160 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
162 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
163 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
164 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
165 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
170 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
171 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
172 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
173 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
174 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
175 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
176 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
177 the use of FCGI_Finish.
179 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
180 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
181 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
183 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
184 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
185 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
187 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
188 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
189 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
190 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
191 than one address or if the address check failed.
193 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
194 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
195 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
198 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
199 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
200 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
201 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
206 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
207 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
208 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
209 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
210 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
211 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
212 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
213 first line of a command interpreter file.
215 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
216 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
217 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
221 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
222 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
223 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
224 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
225 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
226 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
227 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
228 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
229 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
230 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
232 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
233 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
234 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
238 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
239 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
240 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
241 consistent with the other examples.
245 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
246 --------------------------------------
248 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
252 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
253 --------------------------------------
255 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
256 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
257 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
258 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
259 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
260 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
265 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
266 --------------------------------------
268 First public release; new license terms on all files.
270 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
271 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
272 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
277 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
278 ----------------------------------------
280 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
281 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
282 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
283 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
284 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
285 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
286 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
291 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
292 ----------------------------------------
294 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
295 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
296 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
298 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
299 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
300 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
304 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
305 --------------------------------------
307 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
308 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
309 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
310 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
311 end-of-stream indication.
313 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
314 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
315 introduce in later releases.
317 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
318 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
319 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
320 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
321 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
323 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
324 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
326 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
327 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
328 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
329 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
330 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
331 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
332 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
334 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
337 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
338 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
339 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
341 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
344 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
345 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
346 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
349 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
350 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
351 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
352 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
353 The manpage gives full details.
355 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
356 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
357 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
359 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
360 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
362 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
363 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
364 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
365 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
366 file for complete information.
368 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
369 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
371 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
372 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
373 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
378 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
379 ------------------------------------
381 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
384 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
385 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
386 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
387 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
391 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
392 ------------------------