1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 $Id: README,v 1.15 2002/02/19 00:45:54 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 *) Fix a bug that caused an assert to pop when an async file descriptor was
36 numbered greater than 16. Kevin Eye [eye@buffalo.edu]
38 *) Update the echo-cpp example to show the restoral of the original
39 streambufs. Trub, Vladimir [vtrub@purolator.com]
41 *) Fix a bug a that caused the lib to crash under certain circumstances
42 when an error occured on a read
44 *) Test for iostreams that support a streambuf assigment operator
46 *) (WIN32) Fixed initialization of the accept mutex when OpenSocket() was used.
47 Niklas Bergh [niklas.bergh@tific.com]
53 *) Added support for shared libraries.
55 *) Added support for a graceful shutdown via an event under Win32.
57 *) Added default signal handlers for PIPE, USR1, and TERM.
59 *) Fix some minor bugs in the 0S_ layer.
61 *) Fixed the C++ streambuf implementation.
64 Changes with devkit 2.1.1
65 -------------------------
67 *) Fixed an unintentional sign extension during promotion in Java's
68 FCGIInputStream.read(). Takayuki Tachikawa <tachi@po.ntts.co.jp>
70 *) Cleaned up warnings in examples (mostly main() complaints).
72 *) Removed examples/tiny-cgi.c (it wasn't a FastCGI application?!).
74 *) Remove some debugging code and clean up some gcc warnings in cgi-fcgi.c.
76 *) Add multithread support to the fcgiapp lib and an example multithreaded
77 application, threaded.c. Based on work by Dennis Payne
78 <dpayne@softscape.com> and Gene Sokolov <hook@aktrad.ru>.
80 *) Remove the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
82 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
83 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
85 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
87 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
90 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
91 --------------------------------------
93 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
94 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
95 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
96 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
97 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
98 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
99 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
100 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
101 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
102 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
103 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
104 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
105 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
106 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
107 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
108 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
109 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
110 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
111 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
112 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
113 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
116 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
117 --------------------------------------
119 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
120 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
121 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
122 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
123 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
124 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
125 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
126 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
129 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
130 --------------------------------------
132 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
133 functionality to the kit.
134 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
135 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
136 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
137 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
138 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
141 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
142 --------------------------------------
146 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
147 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
149 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
150 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
151 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
152 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
155 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
156 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
158 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
159 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
160 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
161 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
166 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
167 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
168 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
169 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
170 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
171 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
172 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
173 the use of FCGI_Finish.
175 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
176 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
177 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
179 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
180 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
181 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
183 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
184 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
185 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
186 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
187 than one address or if the address check failed.
189 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
190 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
191 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
194 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
195 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
196 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
197 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
202 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
203 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
204 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
205 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
206 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
207 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
208 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
209 first line of a command interpreter file.
211 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
212 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
213 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
217 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
218 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
219 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
220 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
221 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
222 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
223 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
224 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
225 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
226 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
228 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
229 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
230 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
234 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
235 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
236 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
237 consistent with the other examples.
241 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
242 --------------------------------------
244 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
248 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
249 --------------------------------------
251 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
252 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
253 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
254 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
255 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
256 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
261 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
262 --------------------------------------
264 First public release; new license terms on all files.
266 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
267 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
268 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
273 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
274 ----------------------------------------
276 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
277 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
278 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
279 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
280 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
281 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
282 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
287 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
288 ----------------------------------------
290 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
291 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
292 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
294 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
295 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
296 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
300 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
301 --------------------------------------
303 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
304 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
305 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
306 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
307 end-of-stream indication.
309 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
310 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
311 introduce in later releases.
313 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
314 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
315 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
316 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
317 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
319 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
320 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
322 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
323 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
324 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
325 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
326 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
327 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
328 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
330 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
333 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
334 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
335 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
337 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
340 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
341 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
342 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
345 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
346 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
347 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
348 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
349 The manpage gives full details.
351 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
352 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
353 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
355 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
356 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
358 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
359 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
360 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
361 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
362 file for complete information.
364 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
365 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
367 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
368 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
369 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
374 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
375 ------------------------------------
377 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
380 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
381 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
382 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
383 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
387 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
388 ------------------------