1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.12 2001/12/07 02:28:14 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 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
35 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
36 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
42 *) Added support for shared libraries.
44 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
46 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
48 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
50 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
53 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
54 -------------------------
56 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
57 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
59 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
61 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
63 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
65 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
66 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
67 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
69 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
71 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
72 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
74 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
76 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
79 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
80 --------------------------------------
82 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
83 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
84 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
85 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
86 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
87 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
88 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
89 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
90 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
91 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
92 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
93 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
94 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
95 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
96 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
97 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
98 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
99 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
100 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
101 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
102 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
105 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
106 --------------------------------------
108 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
109 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
110 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
111 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
112 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
113 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
114 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
115 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
118 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
119 --------------------------------------
121 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
122 functionality to the kit.
123 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
124 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
125 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
126 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
127 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
130 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
131 --------------------------------------
135 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
136 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
138 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
139 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
140 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
141 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
144 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
145 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
147 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
148 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
149 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
150 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
155 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
156 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
157 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
158 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
159 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
160 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
161 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
162 the use of FCGI_Finish.
164 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
165 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
166 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
168 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
169 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
170 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
172 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
173 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
174 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
175 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
176 than one address or if the address check failed.
178 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
179 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
180 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
183 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
184 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
185 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
186 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
191 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
192 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
193 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
194 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
195 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
196 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
197 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
198 first line of a command interpreter file.
200 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
201 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
202 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
206 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
207 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
208 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
209 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
210 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
211 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
212 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
213 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
214 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
215 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
217 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
218 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
219 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
223 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
224 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
225 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
226 consistent with the other examples.
230 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
231 --------------------------------------
233 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
237 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
238 --------------------------------------
240 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
241 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
242 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
243 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
244 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
245 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
250 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
251 --------------------------------------
253 First public release; new license terms on all files.
255 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
256 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
257 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
262 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
263 ----------------------------------------
265 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
266 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
267 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
268 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
269 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
270 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
271 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
276 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
277 ----------------------------------------
279 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
280 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
281 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
283 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
284 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
285 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
289 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
290 --------------------------------------
292 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
293 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
294 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
295 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
296 end-of-stream indication.
298 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
299 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
300 introduce in later releases.
302 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
303 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
304 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
305 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
306 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
308 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
309 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
311 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
312 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
313 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
314 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
315 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
316 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
317 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
319 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
322 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
323 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
324 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
326 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
329 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
330 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
331 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
334 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
335 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
336 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
337 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
338 The manpage gives full details.
340 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
341 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
342 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
344 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
345 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
347 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
348 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
349 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
350 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
351 file for complete information.
353 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
354 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
356 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
357 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
358 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
363 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
364 ------------------------------------
366 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
369 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
370 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
371 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
372 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
376 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
377 ------------------------