1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.22 2003/06/22 00:16:45 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/.
33 *) Add attach() and detach() support.
39 *) When closing connections, shutdown() the send side of TCP sockets to
40 prevent a TCP RST from trashing the reciept of data on the client (when
41 the client continues to send data to the application).
43 *) [WIN32] force an exit from the ShutdownRequestThread when a shutdown is
44 signaled and NamedPipes are in use.
46 *) Use streamsize and char_type in the C++ API.
48 *) [WIN32] Eliminate the (partial and broken) use of OverlappedIO - this
49 was causing a loose spin in acceptNamedPipe().
51 *) Fix a bug that caused an assert to pop when an async file descriptor was
52 numbered greater than 16. Kevin Eye [eye@buffalo.edu]
54 *) Update the echo-cpp example to show the restoral of the original
55 streambufs. Trub, Vladimir [vtrub@purolator.com]
57 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
58 when an error occured on a read
60 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
62 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
63 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
69 *) Added support for shared libraries.
71 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
73 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
75 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
77 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
80 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
81 -------------------------
83 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
84 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
86 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
88 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
90 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
92 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
93 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
94 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
96 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
98 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
99 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
101 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
103 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
106 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
107 --------------------------------------
109 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
110 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
111 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
112 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
113 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
114 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
115 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
116 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
117 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
118 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
119 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
120 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
121 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
122 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
123 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
124 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
125 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
126 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
127 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
128 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
129 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
132 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
133 --------------------------------------
135 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
136 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
137 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
138 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
139 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
140 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
141 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
142 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
145 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
146 --------------------------------------
148 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
149 functionality to the kit.
150 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
151 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
152 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
153 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
154 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
157 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
158 --------------------------------------
162 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
163 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
165 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
166 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
167 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
168 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
171 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
172 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
174 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
175 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
176 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
177 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
182 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
183 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
184 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
185 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
186 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
187 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
188 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
189 the use of FCGI_Finish.
191 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
192 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
193 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
195 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
196 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
197 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
199 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
200 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
201 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
202 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
203 than one address or if the address check failed.
205 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
206 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
207 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
210 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
211 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
212 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
213 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
218 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
219 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
220 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
221 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
222 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
223 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
224 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
225 first line of a command interpreter file.
227 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
228 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
229 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
233 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
234 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
235 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
236 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
237 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
238 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
239 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
240 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
241 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
242 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
244 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
245 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
246 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
250 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
251 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
252 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
253 consistent with the other examples.
257 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
258 --------------------------------------
260 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
264 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
265 --------------------------------------
267 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
268 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
269 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
270 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
271 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
272 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
277 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
278 --------------------------------------
280 First public release; new license terms on all files.
282 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
283 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
284 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
289 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
290 ----------------------------------------
292 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
293 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
294 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
295 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
296 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
297 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
298 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
303 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
304 ----------------------------------------
306 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
307 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
308 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
310 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
311 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
312 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
316 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
317 --------------------------------------
319 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
320 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
321 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
322 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
323 end-of-stream indication.
325 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
326 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
327 introduce in later releases.
329 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
330 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
331 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
332 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
333 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
335 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
336 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
338 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
339 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
340 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
341 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
342 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
343 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
344 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
346 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
349 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
350 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
351 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
353 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
356 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
357 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
358 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
361 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
362 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
363 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
364 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
365 The manpage gives full details.
367 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
368 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
369 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
371 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
372 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
374 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
375 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
376 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
377 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
378 file for complete information.
380 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
381 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
383 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
384 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
385 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
390 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
391 ------------------------------------
393 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
396 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
397 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
398 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
399 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
403 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
404 ------------------------