1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.18 2002/02/28 15:21:25 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/.
35 *) [WIN32] force an exit from the ShutdownRequestThread when a shutdown is
36 signaled and NamedPipes are in use.
38 *) Use streamsize and char_type in the C++ API.
40 *) [WIN32] Eliminate the (partial and broken) use of OverlappedIO - this
41 was causing a loose spin in acceptNamedPipe().
43 *) Fix a bug that caused an assert to pop when an async file descriptor was
44 numbered greater than 16. Kevin Eye [eye@buffalo.edu]
46 *) Update the echo-cpp example to show the restoral of the original
47 streambufs. Trub, Vladimir [vtrub@purolator.com]
49 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
50 when an error occured on a read
52 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
54 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
55 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
61 *) Added support for shared libraries.
63 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
65 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
67 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
69 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
72 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
73 -------------------------
75 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
76 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
78 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
80 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
82 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
84 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
85 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
86 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
88 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
90 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
91 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
93 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
95 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
98 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
99 --------------------------------------
101 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
102 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
103 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
104 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
105 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
106 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
107 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
108 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
109 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
110 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
111 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
112 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
113 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
114 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
115 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
116 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
117 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
118 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
119 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
120 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
121 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
124 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
125 --------------------------------------
127 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
128 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
129 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
130 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
131 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
132 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
133 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
134 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
137 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
138 --------------------------------------
140 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
141 functionality to the kit.
142 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
143 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
144 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
145 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
146 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
149 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
150 --------------------------------------
154 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
155 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
157 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
158 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
159 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
160 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
163 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
164 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
166 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
167 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
168 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
169 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
174 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
175 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
176 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
177 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
178 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
179 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
180 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
181 the use of FCGI_Finish.
183 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
184 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
185 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
187 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
188 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
189 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
191 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
192 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
193 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
194 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
195 than one address or if the address check failed.
197 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
198 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
199 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
202 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
203 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
204 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
205 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
210 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
211 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
212 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
213 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
214 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
215 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
216 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
217 first line of a command interpreter file.
219 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
220 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
221 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
225 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
226 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
227 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
228 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
229 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
230 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
231 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
232 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
233 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
234 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
236 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
237 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
238 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
242 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
243 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
244 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
245 consistent with the other examples.
249 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
250 --------------------------------------
252 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
256 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
257 --------------------------------------
259 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
260 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
261 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
262 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
263 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
264 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
269 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
270 --------------------------------------
272 First public release; new license terms on all files.
274 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
275 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
276 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
281 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
282 ----------------------------------------
284 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
285 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
286 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
287 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
288 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
289 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
290 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
295 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
296 ----------------------------------------
298 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
299 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
300 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
302 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
303 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
304 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
308 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
309 --------------------------------------
311 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
312 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
313 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
314 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
315 end-of-stream indication.
317 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
318 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
319 introduce in later releases.
321 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
322 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
323 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
324 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
325 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
327 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
328 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
330 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
331 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
332 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
333 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
334 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
335 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
336 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
338 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
341 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
342 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
343 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
345 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
348 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
349 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
350 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
353 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
354 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
355 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
356 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
357 The manpage gives full details.
359 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
360 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
361 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
363 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
364 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
366 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
367 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
368 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
369 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
370 file for complete information.
372 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
373 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
375 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
376 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
377 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
382 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
383 ------------------------------------
385 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
388 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
389 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
390 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
391 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
395 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
396 ------------------------