1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.19 2002/03/04 22:16:40 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 *) [WIN32] shutdown only the send side of a TCP socket to prevent a TCP
36 reset from trashing the reciept of data on the client.
38 *) [WIN32] force an exit from the ShutdownRequestThread when a shutdown is
39 signaled and NamedPipes are in use.
41 *) Use streamsize and char_type in the C++ API.
43 *) [WIN32] Eliminate the (partial and broken) use of OverlappedIO - this
44 was causing a loose spin in acceptNamedPipe().
46 *) Fix a bug that caused an assert to pop when an async file descriptor was
47 numbered greater than 16. Kevin Eye [eye@buffalo.edu]
49 *) Update the echo-cpp example to show the restoral of the original
50 streambufs. Trub, Vladimir [vtrub@purolator.com]
52 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
53 when an error occured on a read
55 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
57 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
58 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
64 *) Added support for shared libraries.
66 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
68 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
70 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
72 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
75 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
76 -------------------------
78 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
79 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
81 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
83 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
85 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
87 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
88 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
89 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
91 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
93 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
94 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
96 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
98 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
101 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
102 --------------------------------------
104 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
105 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
106 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
107 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
108 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
109 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
110 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
111 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
112 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
113 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
114 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
115 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
116 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
117 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
118 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
119 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
120 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
121 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
122 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
123 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
124 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
127 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
128 --------------------------------------
130 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
131 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
132 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
133 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
134 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
135 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
136 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
137 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
140 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
141 --------------------------------------
143 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
144 functionality to the kit.
145 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
146 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
147 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
148 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
149 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
152 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
153 --------------------------------------
157 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
158 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
160 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
161 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
162 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
163 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
166 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
167 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
169 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
170 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
171 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
172 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
177 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
178 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
179 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
180 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
181 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
182 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
183 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
184 the use of FCGI_Finish.
186 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
187 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
188 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
190 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
191 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
192 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
194 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
195 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
196 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
197 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
198 than one address or if the address check failed.
200 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
201 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
202 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
205 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
206 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
207 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
208 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
213 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
214 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
215 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
216 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
217 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
218 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
219 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
220 first line of a command interpreter file.
222 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
223 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
224 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
228 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
229 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
230 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
231 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
232 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
233 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
234 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
235 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
236 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
237 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
239 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
240 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
241 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
245 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
246 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
247 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
248 consistent with the other examples.
252 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
253 --------------------------------------
255 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
259 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
260 --------------------------------------
262 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
263 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
264 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
265 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
266 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
267 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
272 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
273 --------------------------------------
275 First public release; new license terms on all files.
277 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
278 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
279 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
284 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
285 ----------------------------------------
287 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
288 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
289 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
290 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
291 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
292 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
293 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
298 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
299 ----------------------------------------
301 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
302 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
303 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
305 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
306 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
307 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
311 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
312 --------------------------------------
314 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
315 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
316 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
317 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
318 end-of-stream indication.
320 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
321 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
322 introduce in later releases.
324 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
325 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
326 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
327 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
328 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
330 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
331 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
333 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
334 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
335 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
336 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
337 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
338 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
339 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
341 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
344 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
345 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
346 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
348 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
351 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
352 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
353 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
356 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
357 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
358 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
359 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
360 The manpage gives full details.
362 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
363 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
364 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
366 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
367 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
369 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
370 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
371 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
372 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
373 file for complete information.
375 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
376 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
378 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
379 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
380 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
385 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
386 ------------------------------------
388 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
391 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
392 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
393 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
394 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
398 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
399 ------------------------