1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
5 $Id: README,v 1.6 1999/07/26 04:45:52 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 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
43 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
44 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
45 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
47 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
49 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
50 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
52 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
54 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
57 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
58 --------------------------------------
60 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
61 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
62 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
63 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
64 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
65 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
66 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
67 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
68 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
69 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
70 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
71 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
72 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
73 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
74 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
75 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
76 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
77 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
78 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
79 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
80 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
83 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
84 --------------------------------------
86 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
87 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
88 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
89 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
90 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
91 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
92 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
93 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
96 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
97 --------------------------------------
99 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
100 functionality to the kit.
101 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
102 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
103 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
104 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
105 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
108 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
109 --------------------------------------
113 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
114 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
116 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
117 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
118 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
119 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
122 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
123 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
125 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
126 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
127 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
128 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
133 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
134 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
135 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
136 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
137 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
138 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
139 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
140 the use of FCGI_Finish.
142 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
143 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
144 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
146 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
147 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
148 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
150 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
151 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
152 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
153 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
154 than one address or if the address check failed.
156 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
157 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
158 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
161 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
162 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
163 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
164 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
169 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
170 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
171 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
172 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
173 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
174 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
175 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
176 first line of a command interpreter file.
178 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
179 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
180 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
184 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
185 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
186 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
187 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
188 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
189 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
190 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
191 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
192 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
193 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
195 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
196 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
197 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
201 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
202 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
203 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
204 consistent with the other examples.
208 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
209 --------------------------------------
211 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
215 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
216 --------------------------------------
218 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
219 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
220 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
221 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
222 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
223 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
228 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
229 --------------------------------------
231 First public release; new license terms on all files.
233 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
234 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
235 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
240 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
241 ----------------------------------------
243 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
244 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
245 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
246 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
247 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
248 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
249 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
254 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
255 ----------------------------------------
257 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
258 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
259 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
261 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
262 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
263 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
267 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
268 --------------------------------------
270 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
271 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
272 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
273 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
274 end-of-stream indication.
276 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
277 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
278 introduce in later releases.
280 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
281 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
282 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
283 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
284 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
286 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
287 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
289 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
290 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
291 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
292 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
293 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
294 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
295 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
297 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
300 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
301 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
302 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
304 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
307 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
308 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
309 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
312 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
313 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
314 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
315 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
316 The manpage gives full details.
318 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
319 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
320 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
322 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
323 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
325 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
326 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
327 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
328 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
329 file for complete information.
331 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
332 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
334 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
335 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
336 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
341 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
342 ------------------------------------
344 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
347 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
348 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
349 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
350 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
354 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
355 ------------------------