gnu.libmicrohttpd

About
=====

libmicrohttpd is a GNU library (part of the GNU project) written in C
that provides a compact API and implementation of an HTTP 1.1 web
server. libmicrohttpd only implements the HTTP 1.1 protocol. The
main application must still provide the content.


Installation
============

If you are using Subversion, run "autoreconf -fi" to create configure.

In order to run the testcases, you need a recent version of libcurl.
libcurl is not required if you just want to install the library.


Configure options
=================

Especially for development, use "--enable-messages" to enable error
reporting (and use MHD_USE_DEBUG). Error reporting is not enabled by
default to reduce the size of the library (error messages take
space!). If you are concerned about space, you should set "CFLAGS" to
"-Os -fomit-frame-pointer" to have gcc generate tight code. The
resulting binary should be about 30k (without SSL support) depending
on the platform.


Portability
===========

The latest version of libmicrohttpd will try to avoid SIGPIPE on its
sockets. This should work on OS X, Linux and recent BSD systems (at
least). On other systems that may trigger a SIGPIPE on send/recv, the
main application should install a signal handler to handle SIGPIPE.

libmicrohttpd should work well on GNU/Linux, BSD, OS X, W32 and z/OS.
Note that HTTPS is not supported on z/OS (yet).
We also have reports of users using it on vxWorks.


Notes on compiling on z/OS:
---------------------------

After extracting the archive, run

iconv -f UTF-8 -t IBM-1047 contrib/ascebc > /tmp/ascebc.sh
chmod +x /tmp/ascebc.sh
for n in `find * -type f`
do
/tmp/ascebc.sh $n
done

to convert all source files to EBCDIC. Note that you must run
"configure" from the directory where the configure script is
located. Otherwise, configure will fail to find the
"contrib/xcc" script (which is a wrapper around the z/OS c89
compiler).


Development Status
==================

This is a beta release. Below we list things that should be
implemented (in order of importance) before we can claim to be
reasonably complete.


Missing features:
=================
- MHD_get_daemon_info is not implemented
- SSL code is still too large:
* libgcrypt is used, and is also bloated
=> integrate required portions of libgcrypt into our tree
instead of linking against it
* still some bloat in the SSL code;
consider removing "client" functionality
* most likely some headers declare functions, constants
and types that are no longer present or used
* possibly other dead code
- Make sure SSL works on non-GNU/Linux platforms


Untested features:
==================
- add testcases for http/1.1 pipelining (need
to figure out how to ensure curl pipelines
-- and it seems libcurl has issues with pipelining,
see http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2007-12/0248.html)
- add testcases for resource limit enforcement
- add testcases for client queuing early response,
suppressing 100 CONTINUE
- extend testcase for chunked encoding to validate
handling of footers
- more testing for SSL support


Functions not covered by "make check":
======================================
- MHD_get_connection_values
- MHD_set_connection_value
- parse_cookie_header
- parse_arguments
- MHD_del_response_header
- MHD_get_response_headers
- MHD_tls_connection_close


Missing documentation:
======================

- manual:
* document configuration options
* document SSL/TLS support
* document details on porting MHD (plibc, z/OS)
- tutorial:
* clean up English
* make sure everything is accurate