1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.13 2001/12/12 14:12:27 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 Unfortunately documentation of many of the changes have been lost.
33 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
34 when an error occured on a read
36 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
38 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
39 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
45 *) Added support for shared libraries.
47 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
49 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
51 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
53 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
56 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
57 -------------------------
59 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
60 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
62 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
64 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
66 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
68 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
69 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
70 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
72 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
74 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
75 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
77 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
79 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
82 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
83 --------------------------------------
85 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
86 of 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.
90 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
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.
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
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.
108 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
109 --------------------------------------
111 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
112 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
113 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
114 provided, 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
121 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
122 --------------------------------------
124 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
125 functionality to the kit.
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.
129 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
130 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
133 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
134 --------------------------------------
138 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
139 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
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
147 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
148 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
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
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.
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).
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").
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
233 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
234 --------------------------------------
236 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
240 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
241 --------------------------------------
243 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
244 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
245 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
246 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
247 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
248 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
253 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
254 --------------------------------------
256 First public release; new license terms on all files.
258 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
259 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
260 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
265 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
266 ----------------------------------------
268 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
269 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
270 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
271 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
272 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
273 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
274 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
279 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
280 ----------------------------------------
282 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
283 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
284 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
286 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
287 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
288 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
292 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
293 --------------------------------------
295 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
296 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
297 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
298 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
299 end-of-stream indication.
301 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
302 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
303 introduce in later releases.
305 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
306 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
307 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
308 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
309 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
311 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
312 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
314 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
315 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
316 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
317 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
318 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
319 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
320 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
322 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
325 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
326 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
327 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
329 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
332 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
333 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
334 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
337 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
338 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
339 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
340 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
341 The manpage gives full details.
343 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
344 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
345 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
347 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
348 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
350 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
351 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
352 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
353 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
354 file for complete information.
356 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
357 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
359 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
360 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
361 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
366 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
367 ------------------------------------
369 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
372 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
373 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
374 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
375 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
379 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
380 ------------------------