1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
5 $Id: README,v 1.5 1999/07/26 04:28:07 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 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
42 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
43 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
45 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
47 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
48 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
50 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
52 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
55 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
56 --------------------------------------
58 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
59 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
60 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
61 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
62 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
63 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
64 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
65 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
66 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
67 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
68 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
69 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
70 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
71 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
72 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
73 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
74 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
75 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
76 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
77 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
78 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
81 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
82 --------------------------------------
84 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
85 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
86 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
87 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
88 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
89 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
90 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
91 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
94 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
95 --------------------------------------
97 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
98 functionality to the kit.
99 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
100 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
101 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
102 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
103 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
106 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
107 --------------------------------------
111 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
112 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
114 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
115 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
116 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
117 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
120 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
121 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
123 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
124 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
125 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
126 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
131 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
132 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
133 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
134 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
135 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
136 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
137 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
138 the use of FCGI_Finish.
140 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
141 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
142 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
144 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
145 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
146 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
148 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
149 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
150 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
151 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
152 than one address or if the address check failed.
154 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
155 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
156 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
159 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
160 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
161 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
162 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
167 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
168 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
169 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
170 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
171 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
172 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
173 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
174 first line of a command interpreter file.
176 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
177 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
178 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
182 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
183 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
184 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
185 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
186 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
187 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
188 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
189 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
190 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
191 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
193 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
194 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
195 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
199 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
200 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
201 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
202 consistent with the other examples.
206 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
207 --------------------------------------
209 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
213 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
214 --------------------------------------
216 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
217 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
218 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
219 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
220 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
221 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
226 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
227 --------------------------------------
229 First public release; new license terms on all files.
231 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
232 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
233 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
238 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
239 ----------------------------------------
241 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
242 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
243 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
244 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
245 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
246 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
247 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
252 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
253 ----------------------------------------
255 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
256 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
257 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
259 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
260 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
261 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
265 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
266 --------------------------------------
268 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
269 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
270 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
271 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
272 end-of-stream indication.
274 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
275 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
276 introduce in later releases.
278 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
279 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
280 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
281 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
282 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
284 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
285 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
287 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
288 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
289 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
290 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
291 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
292 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
293 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
295 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
298 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
299 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
300 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
302 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
305 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
306 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
307 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
310 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
311 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
312 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
313 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
314 The manpage gives full details.
316 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
317 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
318 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
320 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
321 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
323 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
324 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
325 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
326 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
327 file for complete information.
329 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
330 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
332 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
333 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
334 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
339 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
340 ------------------------------------
342 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
345 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
346 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
347 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
348 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
352 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
353 ------------------------