NEWS in package ‘FastRWeb’

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Changes in version 1.2-1 (2023-11-28)

• Silence benign compiler warnings

Changes in version 1.2-0 (2021-11-03)

• add support for request headers (#11) They are passed as named character vectors in 'request$headers' where the names as all lower-case. If not present they may be 'NULL' or 'charcter()' so use 'length()' to check presence. For CGI back-end this is done by parsing the 'HTTP_xxx' env vars and assigning then to the global environment. Note that this incurs a slight performance penalty, so it can be diabled by adding '-DNO_HTTP_HEADERS' to 'CPPFLAGS'. For Rserve/httpd back-end the headers are already parsed for cookies so there is no significant penalty.

Changes in version 1.1-4 (2020-03-11)

• minor fixes only affecting rare systems: - use crypt() where available, do not assume unix is sufficient - include crypt.h on systems that have it and thus possibly require it in addition so standard headers (like Solaris)
• use C++ compiler in configure tests

Changes in version 1.1-3 (2020-03-10)

• use AC_LANG_SOURCE() in configure to avoid warnings
• minor fix in the documentation

Changes in version 1.1-2 (2020-03-02)

• enhance output functions to provide an option to escape special HTML characters. This (escape=TRUE)is now the default for oprint(), ohead() and otable().
• added FastRWeb:::htmlEscape(). It is currently not exported as to not clash with htmltools.
• append '.pdf' and '.svg' to the temporary file name in 'WebPlot' for PDF and SVG output, because those back-ends always append the extension if not present. Also change tag type from "img" to "embed" for PDF and add the correct mime type for type="svg".
• clean up build system and compiler warnings, restore support for Windows including multi-arch builds. NOTE: Rcgi executables are now in the $(R_ARCH) subdirectory of cgi-bin, so pick the the desired architecture and install in cgi-bin as needed.
• in Rserve stand-alone setup pass the status code from the Status: header to the client in the response (#6)

Changes in version 1.1-1 (2015-07-27)

• clear the output buffer before serving run() scripts
• using out() on WebPlots will now use dataURI instead of temporary files
• import Cairo to avoid namespace clash with other packages that define Cairo to be something entirely different.

Changes in version 1.1-0 (2012-12-15)

• The interface to the R process has been enhanced to support request body and other methods including POST. A new global variable ‘request’ is a list that is populated with various entries pertinent to the request: request$uri - URI of the request (used to be request.URI) request$method - method type (as string) such as "GET" request$c.type - content type of the request body request$c.length - length of the request body (-1 if there is no body) request$body - raw vector containing the body of the request request$client.ip - IP address of the client (as string) request$raw.cookies - raw cookie string request$path.info - path part beyond the script name All strings are guaranteed to be "" if not set. request$body will be NULL if there is no body.
• The interface to the R process now sets a global variable 'webapi' which is a real number that defines the version of the interface used to pass information. It is now set to 1.1 and guarantees the information described above. This number will be increased in case new features are added to the API between the R process and the web server.
• FastRWeb now provides an internal ‘.run()’ function which does the necessary processing of a request, so additional FastRWeb-compliant front-ends are easy to implement by simply creating the request structure and calling the ‘.run()’ function.
• FastRWeb contains an experimental .http.request() implementation which can be used with Rserve's HTTP server, removing all middle layers - no webserver, CGI or PHP is needed. Simply evaluate '.http.request <- FastRWeb:::.http.request' during Rserve startup.
• FastRWeb now attempts to parse known content types - not just the query string but also "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" and multi-part encodings. If the key name is used, query string has higher precedence. It is still possible to separate the various types by hand from request$body, for multipart content content FastRWeb now provides parse.multipart() function (courtesy of Jeff Horner).
• Rcgi will respond with appropriate status code to various error conditions, such as failed connection. Previously, Rcgi would always respond with 200 OK.
• Rcgi bugfix: the parameter sanitization code was behaving improperly.
• Rcgi has been updated to switch to binary stdout for file and tmpfile on Windows, otherwise binary data (like images) will arrive malformed at the webserver when running FastRWeb on Windows (thanks to Francois Guillem for reporting and testing).
• clean up quoting inside attributes in o* tools
• added oclear() to re-set output and/or headers
• Parameters to run() were passed in URL-encoded form - that was a bug. They are now passed in decoded form as intended. WARNING: if you worked around this bug in your scripts for FastRWeb 1.0 make sure you remove the work around for FastRWeb 1.1 and higher (check for the presence of webapi if you need to support both).

Changes in version 1.0-1

• added rudimentary form elements constructors: oinput(), oselection() and osubmit()
• some S3 methods were not registered in the namespace

Changes in version 1.0-0

• CRAN release
• add examples and tmp.R implementation
• add support for headers manipulation
• add sample project root configuration and install.sh for installation

Changes in version 0.1-0

• add WebResult and WebPlot classes (2008/13/13)
• first public version