1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.11 2001/11/30 17:48:58 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.
33 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
34 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
40 *) Added support for shared libraries.
42 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
44 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
46 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
48 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
51 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
52 -------------------------
54 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
55 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
57 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
59 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
61 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
63 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
64 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
65 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
67 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
69 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
70 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
72 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
74 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
77 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
78 --------------------------------------
80 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
81 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
82 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
83 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
84 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
85 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
86 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
87 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
88 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
89 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
90 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
91 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
92 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
93 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
94 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
95 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
96 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
97 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
98 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
99 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
100 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
103 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
104 --------------------------------------
106 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
107 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
108 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
109 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
110 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
111 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
112 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
113 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
116 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
117 --------------------------------------
119 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
120 functionality to the kit.
121 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
122 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
123 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
124 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
125 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
128 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
129 --------------------------------------
133 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
134 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
136 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
137 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
138 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
139 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
142 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
143 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
145 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
146 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
147 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
148 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
153 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
154 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
155 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
156 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
157 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
158 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
159 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
160 the use of FCGI_Finish.
162 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
163 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
164 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
166 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
167 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
168 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
170 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
171 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
172 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
173 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
174 than one address or if the address check failed.
176 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
177 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
178 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
181 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
182 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
183 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
184 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
189 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
190 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
191 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
192 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
193 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
194 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
195 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
196 first line of a command interpreter file.
198 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
199 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
200 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
204 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
205 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
206 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
207 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
208 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
209 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
210 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
211 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
212 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
213 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
215 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
216 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
217 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
221 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
222 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
223 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
224 consistent with the other examples.
228 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
229 --------------------------------------
231 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
235 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
236 --------------------------------------
238 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
239 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
240 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
241 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
242 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
243 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
248 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
249 --------------------------------------
251 First public release; new license terms on all files.
253 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
254 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
255 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
260 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
261 ----------------------------------------
263 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
264 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
265 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
266 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
267 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
268 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
269 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
274 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
275 ----------------------------------------
277 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
278 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
279 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
281 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
282 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
283 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
287 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
288 --------------------------------------
290 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
291 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
292 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
293 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
294 end-of-stream indication.
296 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
297 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
298 introduce in later releases.
300 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
301 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
302 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
303 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
304 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
306 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
307 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
309 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
310 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
311 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
312 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
313 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
314 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
315 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
317 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
320 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
321 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
322 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
324 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
327 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
328 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
329 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
332 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
333 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
334 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
335 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
336 The manpage gives full details.
338 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
339 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
340 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
342 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
343 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
345 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
346 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
347 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
348 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
349 file for complete information.
351 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
352 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
354 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
355 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
356 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
361 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
362 ------------------------------------
364 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
367 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
368 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
369 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
370 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
374 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
375 ------------------------