Release Notes

Mbedthis AppWeb 1.3.0 Release Notes

Welcome to the Mbedthis AppWeb™ install distribution. This document provides release-specific information for Mbedthis AppWeb.

The 1.0.3 release is the currently shipping stable version of Mbedthis AppWeb. The 1.3.0 release is the development branch where new features will be tested. If you are wanting to use AppWeb in a production system, we suggest you use the stable release.

System Requirements

Operating System Support

• Linux 2.4 (x86)
• Windows XP
• Windows 2000 (x86)

Development Environment Hardware Platform Support

If you wish to build the samples or rebuild Mbedthis AppWeb from source code, you will need to use a C++ compiler and associated development tools. Several development environments are supported. You may choose any of the following to compile and build samples and source code.

• Linux GNU tools
• Windows Visual Studio (Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio.NET 2003)
• Windows Cygwin GNU emulation. Note: this still requires the MS C/C++ compiler.
  

Run-time System Requirements

To run Mbedthis AppWeb, your system will need at least the following

• 400 KB spare RAM memory
• 600 KB disk / ROM space
• TCP/IP network stack

To develop applications that use Mbedthis AppWeb you will need an additional

• 4 MB disk space

To rebuild AppWeb from source code, you will need at least

• 15 MB disk space

Features

This release includes support for the following features:

• HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 compliant HTTP server
• Apache style configuration
  
• Embeddable in single and multithreaded applications
• Embedded Server Pages (ESP)
• Embedded JavaScript (EJS)
• Embedded Gateway Interface (EGI)
• Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• PHP4
• Digest and basic authentication
• Access and error logging streams
  
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) via OpenSSL and MatrixSSL
• Sandboxing environment for additional security
  
• HTTP client
• Extensible via dynamically loadable modules
• Samples
• Documentation

Additionally, the source distribution includes a loadable module for PHP5 and a file upload module.

Release Build

This distribution is a RELEASE build and has little trace and or debug assertions to help find bugs. If you rebuild from source code, a DEBUG build will be created which has more trace to assist in debugging. Performance with the DEBUG build will be slower and the memory footprint will be larger than with the release build.

Helpful Hints

Debug Trace and Logging

AppWeb has a debug logging and trace facility that can help greatly when debugging configuration issues or developing your application code that uses AppWeb. You can see what modules are loaded and how, what requests arrive and how they are serviced. You can also vary the level of logging via the appWeb.conf configuration file or via the -l logfile command line switch. The log command line switch has the format

-l logFile:logLevel

where level can be from 0 to 9, with 9 being the most verbose level. A level of 6 usually gives plenty of detail. You can define the log file and log level via the appWeb.conf file using the ErrorLog and LogLevel directives.

Configuration Errors

To display exactly how AppWeb is parsing an appWeb.conf configuration file, try

appWeb -c

This will dump full details on how AppWeb interprets the configuration file. Remember that unlike Apache, AppWeb parses the configuration file only once and so the order of directives matters greatly.

Limitations and Special Notes

1. The file upload module is experimental and is subject to change. It is supplied as source but not compiled into the binary release.
2. An experimental PHP5 modules is included in the source distribution.
   
3. The Solaris port is incomplete and experimental.
   

Resolved Issues

See the new features and fixes in the New Features document.