1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.10 2001/11/27 12:58:34 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.
34 *) Added support for shared libraries.
36 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
38 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
40 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
42 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
45 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
46 -------------------------
48 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
49 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
51 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
53 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
55 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
57 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
58 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
59 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
61 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
63 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
64 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
66 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
68 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
71 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
72 --------------------------------------
74 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
75 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
76 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
77 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
78 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
79 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
80 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
81 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
82 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
83 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
84 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
85 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
86 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
87 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
88 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
89 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
90 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
91 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
92 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
93 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
94 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
97 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
98 --------------------------------------
100 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
101 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
102 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
103 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
104 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
105 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
106 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
107 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
110 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
111 --------------------------------------
113 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
114 functionality to the kit.
115 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
116 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
117 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
118 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
119 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
122 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
123 --------------------------------------
127 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
128 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
130 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
131 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
132 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
133 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
136 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
137 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
139 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
140 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
141 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
142 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
147 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
148 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
149 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
150 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
151 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
152 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
153 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
154 the use of FCGI_Finish.
156 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
157 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
158 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
160 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
161 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
162 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
164 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
165 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
166 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
167 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
168 than one address or if the address check failed.
170 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
171 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
172 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
175 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
176 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
177 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
178 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
183 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
184 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
185 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
186 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
187 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
188 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
189 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
190 first line of a command interpreter file.
192 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
193 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
194 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
198 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
199 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
200 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
201 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
202 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
203 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
204 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
205 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
206 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
207 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
209 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
210 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
211 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
215 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
216 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
217 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
218 consistent with the other examples.
222 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
223 --------------------------------------
225 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
229 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
230 --------------------------------------
232 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
233 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
234 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
235 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
236 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
237 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
242 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
243 --------------------------------------
245 First public release; new license terms on all files.
247 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
248 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
249 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
254 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
255 ----------------------------------------
257 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
258 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
259 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
260 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
261 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
262 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
263 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
268 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
269 ----------------------------------------
271 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
272 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
273 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
275 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
276 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
277 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
281 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
282 --------------------------------------
284 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
285 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
286 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
287 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
288 end-of-stream indication.
290 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
291 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
292 introduce in later releases.
294 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
295 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
296 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
297 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
298 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
300 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
301 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
303 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
304 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
305 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
306 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
307 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
308 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
309 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
311 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
314 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
315 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
316 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
318 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
321 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
322 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
323 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
326 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
327 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
328 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
329 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
330 The manpage gives full details.
332 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
333 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
334 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
336 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
337 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
339 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
340 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
341 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
342 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
343 file for complete information.
345 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
346 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
348 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
349 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
350 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
355 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
356 ------------------------------------
358 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
361 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
362 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
363 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
364 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
368 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
369 ------------------------