1 FastCGI Developer's Kit README
2 ------------------------------
4 Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
5 $Id: README,v 1.4 1999/06/10 21:20:33 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 the printf() and #include of stdio.h from examples/echo2.c.
43 *) Remove the static initialization of _fcgi_sF[] because on glibc 2.x based
44 systems stdin/stdout/stderr are no longer static.
46 *) Flush FastCGI buffers at application exit. <eichin@fastengines.com>
48 << INSERT OTHER STUFF HERE >>
51 What's New: Version 2.0b2, 04 April 1997
52 --------------------------------------
54 Some additional bug fixes, mostly on NT port. The following list
55 of the bugs that have been and fixed:
56 1. Updated build_no_shell.bat to create a FcgiBin directory under the
57 top level of the FastCGI kit and copy all executables and the
58 FastCGI dll there. This makes it easier to use.
59 2. Corrected the Unix version of OS_SpawnChild so that it didn't close
60 the listenFd when forking off child processes. This code would
61 affect the cgi-fcgi application on Unix. The problem is that it
62 could only start one fastcgi process. Any other processes would not
63 get the listen file descriptor and they would die.
64 3. Corrected cgi-fcgi.c so that it properly handled large posts. The
65 bug was introduced with the asynchronous I/O model implemented for
66 the Windows NT port. The problem was not clearing a bit indicating
67 that a read had completed. This caused the application to stall.
68 4. Corrected OS_DoIo, the function used for scheduling I/O for cgi-fcgi.
69 It had a bug where it wasn't creating a copy of the file descriptors
70 used for I/O. This would cause the master list of FDs to watch to be
71 reset and thus would hang the application because we would no longer
72 watch for I/O on those file descriptors. (This problem was specific to
73 Unix and only happened with the cgi-fcgi application.)
74 5. Cleaned up several compilation warnings present on OSF.
77 What's New: Version 2.0b1, 24 March 1997
78 --------------------------------------
80 This "beta" release adds the functionality of "cgi-fcgi" to the
81 Windows NT platform and allows for creation of FastCGI applications
82 running in Win32 environment. There is almost no new documentation
83 provided, but will become part of this kit in the official release.
84 1. Added FastCGI libraries running on Windows NT 3.51+
85 2. Rename errno to FCGI_errno in the FCGX_Stream, which was causing
86 problems on some Linux platforms and NT.
87 3. Fixed a parenthesis problem in FCGI_gets
90 What's New: Version 1.5.1, 12 December 1996
91 --------------------------------------
93 This release introduces mostly bug fixes, without any additional
94 functionality to the kit.
95 1. Conditional compilation for the hp-ux compiler.
96 2. Loop around the accept() call to eliminate "OS Error: Interrupted
97 System Call" message from appearing in the error logs.
98 3. Casting of the FCGI_Header to (char *), which eliminates the
99 assertion failure "bufPtr->size>0".
102 What's New: Version 1.5, 12 June 1996
103 --------------------------------------
107 Added a white paper on FastCGI application performance to the
108 doc directory. Generally brought the other docs up to date.
110 Rearranged the kit to put more emphasis on running FastCGI-capable
111 servers and less on running cgi-fcgi. Added
112 examples/conf/om-httpd.config, a config file that demonstrates all
113 of the example apps. (Would like to have similar configs for NCSA
116 Added the tiny-authorizer and sample-store applications to
117 the examples. These are explained in the index.html.
119 In addition to everything else it does, sample-store demonstrates
120 a bug in the Open Market WebServer 2.0: When an Authorizer
121 application denies access, the server tacks some extra junk onto
122 the end of the page the application returns. A little ugly but
127 Added the functions FCGX_Finish and FCGI_Finish. These functions
128 finish the current request from the HTTP server but do not begin a
129 new request. These functions make it possible for applications to
130 perform other processing between requests. An application must not
131 use its stdin, stdout, stderr, or environ between calling
132 FCGI_Finish and calling FCGI_Accept. See doc/FCGI_Finish.3 for
133 more information. The application examples/sample-store.c demonstrates
134 the use of FCGI_Finish.
136 Added conditional 'extern "C"' stuff to the .h files fcgi_stdio.h,
137 fcgiapp.h, and fcgiappmisc.h for the benefit of C++ applications
138 (suggested by Jim McCarthy).
140 Fixed two bugs in FCGX_VFPrintF (reported by Ben Laurie). These
141 bugs affected processing of %f format specifiers and of all format
142 specifiers containing a precision spec (e.g "%12.4g").
144 Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the environment variable
145 FCGI_WEBSERVER_ADDRS was being read rather than the specified
146 FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS. Fixed a bug in FCGX_Accept in which the
147 wrong storage was freed when FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS contained more
148 than one address or if the address check failed.
150 Changed FCGX_Accept to avoid depending upon accept(2) returning the
151 correct value of sin_family in the socketaddr structure for an
152 AF_UNIX connection (SCO returns the wrong value, as reported by Paul
155 Changed the error retry logic in FCGX_Accept. FCGX_Accept now
156 returns -1 only in case of operating system errors that occur while
157 accepting a connection (e.g. out of file descriptors). Other errors
158 cause the current connection to be dropped and a new connection to
163 Changed FCGI.xs to make it insensitive to Perl's treatment of
164 environ (we hope). Changed FCGI::accept so the initial environment
165 variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI::accept (or on
166 subsequent calls either). Added the echo-perl example
167 program. Added a workaround for the "empty initial environment bug"
168 to tiny-perl-fcgi. Changed the example Perl scripts to use a new
169 symbolic link ./perl, avoiding the HP-UX 32 character limit on the
170 first line of a command interpreter file.
172 Because the FastCGI-enabled Perl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
173 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C. There's
174 a new Perl subroutine FCGI::finish.
178 Fixed a bug in tclFCGI.c that caused the request environment
179 variables to be lost. Changed FCGI_Accept so the initial
180 environment variables are not unset on the first call to FCGI_Accept
181 (or on subsequent calls either). Added the echo-tcl example
182 program. Fixed another bug that caused Tcl to become confused by
183 file opens; as a side effect of this change, writes to stdout/stderr
184 that occur in an app running as FastCGI before FCGI_Accept is called
185 are no-ops rather than crashing Tcl. Changed the example Tcl
186 scripts to use a new symbolic link ./tclsh, avoiding the HP-UX 32
187 character limit on the first line of a command interpreter file.
189 Because the FastCGI-enabled Tcl interpreter uses the C fcgi_stdio
190 library, it picks up all the changes listed above for C; there's
191 a new Tcl command FCGI_Finish.
195 Fixed a sign-extension bug in FCGIMessage.java that caused bad encodings
196 of names and values in name-value pairs for lengths in [128..255].
197 Made small cleanups in the Java example programs to make them more
198 consistent with the other examples.
202 What's New: Version 1.4, 10 May 1996
203 --------------------------------------
205 Includes Java classes and Java examples.
209 What's New: Version 1.3.1, 6 May 1996
210 --------------------------------------
212 New, simplified, license terms. Includes an expanded whitepaper that
213 describes FastCGI support in Open Market's Secure WebServer 2.0.
214 Includes Open Market FastCGI 1.0 Programmer's Guide. Includes
215 "FastCGI: A High-Performance Gateway Interface", a position paper
216 presented at the workshop "Programming the Web - a search for APIs",
217 Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, 6 May 1996, Paris,
222 What's New: Version 1.3, 29 April 1996
223 --------------------------------------
225 First public release; new license terms on all files.
227 Changed cgi-fcgi.c to use SO_REUSEADDR when creating the listening socket;
228 this avoids the need to wait through the TIME_WAIT state on all the TCP
229 connections made by the previous instance of an external application
234 What's New: Version 1.2.2, 15 April 1996
235 ----------------------------------------
237 Partially fixed a bug in Perl's FCGI::accept (source file FCGI.xs).
238 The per-request environment variables were being lost. Now the
239 per-request environment variables show up correctly, except that if
240 the Perl application has an empty initial environment, the environment
241 variables associated with the *first* request are lost. Therefore,
242 when starting Perl, always set some environment variable using the
243 AppClass -initial-env option, or by running cgi-fcgi in a non-empty
248 What's New: Version 1.2.1, 22 March 1996
249 ----------------------------------------
251 Fixed a bug in FCGI_Accept. If your application running as FastCGI
252 opened a file before calling FCGI_Accept, it would decide that it
253 was really running as CGI. Things went downhill quickly after that!
255 Also added advisory locking to serialize calls to accept on shared
256 listening sockets on Solaris and IRIX, to work around problems
257 with concurrent accept calls on these platforms.
261 What's New: Version 1.2, 20 March 1996
262 --------------------------------------
264 1. This version of the kit implements the most recent draft
265 of the protocol spec. Enhancements to the protocol include
266 a BEGIN_REQUEST record that simplifies request ID management
267 and transmits role and keep-alive information, and a simplified
268 end-of-stream indication.
270 The protocol spec has been revised to describe exactly what's
271 been implemented, leaving out the features that we hope to
272 introduce in later releases.
274 At the application level, the visible change is the FCGI_ROLE
275 variable that's available to applications. This allows an application
276 to check that it has been invoked in the expected role. A single
277 application can be written to respond in several roles. The
278 FCGI_Accept.3 manpage contains more information.
280 2. We introduced the new "module" prefix FCGX in order to simplify
281 the relationship between fcgi_stdio and fcgiapp.
283 A growing number of functions are provided in both fcgi_stdio and
284 fcgiapp versions. Rather than inventing an ad hoc solution for each
285 naming conflict (as we did with FCGI_accept and FCGI_Accept), we've
286 bitten the bullet and systematically renamed *all* the fcgapp
287 primitives with the prefix FCGX_. In fcgi_stdio, we've renamed
288 FCGI_accept to FCGI_Accept. So all functions that are common in the
289 two libraries have the same name modulo the different prefixes.
291 The Accept function visible in Tcl is now called FCGI_Accept, not
294 The Accept function visible in Perl is now FCGI::accept. All
295 lower case names for functions and all upper case names for
296 modules appears to be a Perl convention, so we conform.
298 3. The kit now fully supports the Responder, Authorizer,
301 The Filter role required a new function, FCGI_StartFilterData.
302 FCGI_StartFilterData changes the input stream from reading
303 FCGI_STDIN data to reading FCGI_DATA data. The manpage
306 Another new function, FCGI_SetExitStatus, is primarily for
307 the Responder role but is available to all. FCGI_SetExitStatus
308 allows an application to set a nonzero "exit" status
309 before completing a request and calling FCGI_Accept again.
310 The manpage gives full details.
312 These two new functions are provided at both the fcgi_stdio interface
313 and the basic fcgiapp interface. Naturally, the fcgiapp versions are
314 called FCGX_StartFilterData and FCGX_SetExitStatus.
316 4. The fcgiapp interface changed slightly in order to treat
317 the streams and environment data more symmetrically.
319 FCGX_Accept now returns an environment pointer, rather than requiring
320 a call to FCGX_GetAllParams to retrieve an environment pointer.
321 FCGX_GetParam takes an explicit environment pointer argument.
322 FCGX_GetAllParams is eliminated. See the documentation in the header
323 file for complete information.
325 fcgiapp also added the procedure FCGX_IsCGI, providing a standardized
326 test of whether the app was started as CGI or FastCGI.
328 5. We've ported the kits to vendor-supported ANSI C compilers
329 on Sun (Solaris 2.X), HP, and Digital platforms. GCC can be
330 selected on these platforms by performing SETENV CC gcc before
335 What's New: Version 1.1, 30 Jan 1996
336 ------------------------------------
338 1. More platforms: Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX,
341 2. Perl and Tcl: Simple recipes for producing Perl and Tcl
342 interpreters that run as FastCGI applications. No source
343 code changes are needed to Perl and Tcl. Documented
344 in separate documents, accessible via the index page.
348 Version 1.0, 10 Jan 1996
349 ------------------------