1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
5 $Id: README,v 1.8 1999/07/26 05:32:57 roberts Exp $
6 Copyright (c) 1996 Open Market, Inc.
7 See the file "LICENSE.TERMS" for information on usage and redistribution
8 of this file, and for a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES.
13 Open the kit's index page, index.html in this directory, using the
14 "Open File" command in your Web browser. The index page gives you an
15 overview of the kit structure and helps you navigate the kit. The
16 index page also contains links that run some example applications, but
17 the applications won't work when index.html is opened using the "Open
18 File" command because they aren't being accessed through a Web server.
20 For further instructions see the FastCGI Developer's Kit
21 document, accessible via the index page.
26 The following is a small list of what should be available in the final
28 1. Fix all compilation problems on all Unixes and NT.
29 2. Provide perl.c for perl5.003 (replace run() with runops())
30 3. Provide latest Tcl patches (NT requires Tcl7.5+)
31 4. Provide FCGI_VERSION directive for automatic version recognition.
33 5. Provide new Java interface to conform to JDK1.1.1 (due to final
35 6. Provide samples of Perl on NT.
38 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
39 -------------------------
41 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
43 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
45 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
47 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
48 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
49 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
51 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
53 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
54 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
56 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
58 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
61 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
62 --------------------------------------
64 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
65 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
66 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
67 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
68 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
69 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
70 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
71 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
72 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
73 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
74 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
75 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
76 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
77 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
78 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
79 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
80 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
81 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
82 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
83 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
84 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
87 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
88 --------------------------------------
90 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
91 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
92 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
93 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
94 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
95 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
96 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
97 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
100 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
101 --------------------------------------
103 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
104 functionality to the kit.
105 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
106 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
107 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
108 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
109 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
112 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
113 --------------------------------------
117 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
118 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
120 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
121 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
122 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
123 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
126 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
127 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
129 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
130 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
131 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
132 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
137 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
138 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
139 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
140 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
141 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
142 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
143 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
144 the use of FCGI_Finish.
146 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
147 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
148 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
150 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
151 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
152 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
154 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
155 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
156 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
157 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
158 than one address or if the address check failed.
160 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
161 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
162 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
165 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
166 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
167 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
168 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
173 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
174 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
175 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
176 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
177 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
178 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
179 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
180 first line of a command interpreter file.
182 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
183 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
184 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
188 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
189 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
190 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
191 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
192 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
193 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
194 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
195 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
196 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
197 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
199 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
200 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
201 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
205 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
206 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
207 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
208 consistent with the other examples.
212 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
213 --------------------------------------
215 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
219 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
220 --------------------------------------
222 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
223 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
224 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
225 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
226 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
227 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
232 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
233 --------------------------------------
235 First public release; new license terms on all files.
237 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
238 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
239 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
244 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
245 ----------------------------------------
247 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
248 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
249 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
250 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
251 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
252 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
253 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
258 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
259 ----------------------------------------
261 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
262 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
263 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
265 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
266 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
267 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
271 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
272 --------------------------------------
274 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
275 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
276 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
277 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
278 end-of-stream indication.
280 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
281 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
282 introduce in later releases.
284 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
285 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
286 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
287 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
288 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
290 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
291 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
293 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
294 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
295 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
296 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
297 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
298 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
299 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
301 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
304 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
305 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
306 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
308 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
311 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
312 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
313 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
316 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
317 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
318 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
319 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
320 The manpage gives full details.
322 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
323 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
324 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
326 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
327 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
329 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
330 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
331 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
332 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
333 file for complete information.
335 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
336 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
338 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
339 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
340 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
345 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
346 ------------------------------------
348 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
351 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
352 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
353 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
354 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
358 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
359 ------------------------