1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.20 2002/03/05 18:15:17 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 *) When closing connections, shutdown() the send side of TCP sockets to
36 prevent a TCP RST from trashing the reciept of data on the client (when
37 the client continues to send data to the application).
39 *) [WIN32] force an exit from the ShutdownRequestThread when a shutdown is
40 signaled and NamedPipes are in use.
42 *) Use streamsize and char_type in the C++ API.
44 *) [WIN32] Eliminate the (partial and broken) use of OverlappedIO - this
45 was causing a loose spin in acceptNamedPipe().
47 *) Fix a bug that caused an assert to pop when an async file descriptor was
48 numbered greater than 16. Kevin Eye [eye@buffalo.edu]
50 *) Update the echo-cpp example to show the restoral of the original
51 streambufs. Trub, Vladimir [vtrub@purolator.com]
53 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
54 when an error occured on a read
56 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
58 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
59 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
65 *) Added support for shared libraries.
67 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
69 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
71 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
73 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
76 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
77 -------------------------
79 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
80 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
82 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
84 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
86 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
88 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
89 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
90 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
92 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
94 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
95 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
97 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
99 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
102 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
103 --------------------------------------
105 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
106 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
107 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
108 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
109 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
110 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
111 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
112 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
113 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
114 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
115 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
116 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
117 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
118 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
119 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
120 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
121 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
122 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
123 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
124 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
125 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
128 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
129 --------------------------------------
131 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
132 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
133 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
134 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
135 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
136 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
137 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
138 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
141 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
142 --------------------------------------
144 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
145 functionality to the kit.
146 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
147 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
148 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
149 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
150 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
153 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
154 --------------------------------------
158 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
159 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
161 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
162 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
163 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
164 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
167 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
168 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
170 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
171 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
172 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
173 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
178 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
179 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
180 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
181 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
182 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
183 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
184 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
185 the use of FCGI_Finish.
187 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
188 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
189 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
191 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
192 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
193 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
195 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
196 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
197 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
198 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
199 than one address or if the address check failed.
201 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
202 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
203 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
206 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
207 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
208 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
209 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
214 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
215 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
216 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
217 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
218 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
219 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
220 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
221 first line of a command interpreter file.
223 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
224 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
225 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
229 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
230 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
231 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
232 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
233 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
234 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
235 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
236 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
237 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
238 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
240 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
241 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
242 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
246 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
247 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
248 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
249 consistent with the other examples.
253 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
254 --------------------------------------
256 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
260 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
261 --------------------------------------
263 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
264 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
265 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
266 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
267 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
268 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
273 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
274 --------------------------------------
276 First public release; new license terms on all files.
278 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
279 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
280 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
285 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
286 ----------------------------------------
288 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
289 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
290 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
291 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
292 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
293 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
294 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
299 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
300 ----------------------------------------
302 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
303 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
304 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
306 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
307 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
308 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
312 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
313 --------------------------------------
315 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
316 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
317 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
318 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
319 end-of-stream indication.
321 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
322 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
323 introduce in later releases.
325 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
326 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
327 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
328 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
329 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
331 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
332 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
334 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
335 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
336 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
337 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
338 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
339 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
340 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
342 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
345 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
346 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
347 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
349 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
352 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
353 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
354 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
357 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
358 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
359 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
360 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
361 The manpage gives full details.
363 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
364 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
365 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
367 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
368 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
370 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
371 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
372 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
373 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
374 file for complete information.
376 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
377 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
379 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
380 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
381 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
386 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
387 ------------------------------------
389 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
392 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
393 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
394 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
395 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
399 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
400 ------------------------