NAME

Apache::ASP - Active Server Pages for Apache with mod_perl 

SYNOPSIS

SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::ASP
PerlSetVar Global /tmp/asp

DESCRIPTION

This perl module provides an Active Server Pages port to the Apache HTTP Server with perl as the host scripting language. Active Server Pages is a web application platform that originated with the Microsoft IIS server. Under Apache for both Win32 and Unix, it allows a developer to create dynamic web applications with session management and perl code embedded in static html files.

This is a portable solution, similar to ActiveState PerlScript and MKS PScript implementation of perl for IIS ASP. Work has been done and will continue to make ports to and from these other implementations as smooth as possible.

This module works under the Apache HTTP Server with the mod_perl module enabled. See http://www.apache.org and http://perl.apache.org for further information.

For Apache::ASP downloading and installation, please read the INSTALL section.

For database access, ActiveX, and scripting language issues, please read the FAQ section.

WEBSITE

The Apache::ASP website is at http://www.nodeworks.com/asp/ which you can also find in the ./site directory of the source distribution.

INSTALL

The latest Apache::ASP can be found at your nearest CPAN, and also:

http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/Apache/

As a perl user, you should make yourself familiar with the CPAN.pm module, and how it may be used to install Apache::ASP, and other related modules.

Once you have downloaded it, Apache::ASP installs easily using the make or nmake commands as shown below. Otherwise, just copy ASP.pm to $PERLLIB/site/Apache

> perl Makefile.PL
> make 
> make test
> make install

* use nmake for win32

Please note that you must first have the Apache HTTP Server & mod_perl installed before using this module in a web server environment. The offline mode for building static html may be used with just perl.

Need Help

Often, installing the mod_perl part of the Apache server can be the hardest part. If this is the case for you, check out the FAQ and SUPPORT sections for further help.

RedHat Issues

If you have a RedHat Linux server with an RPM style Apache + mod_perl, seriously consider building a static version of the httpd server yourself, not DSO. DSO is marked as experimental for mod_perl, and often does not work, resulting in "no request object" error messages.

Quick Start

Once you have successfully built the Apache HTTP Server with mod_perl, copy the ./site/eg/ directory from the Apache::ASP installation to your Apache document tree and try it out! You must put "AllowOverride All" in your httpd.conf <Directory> config section to let the .htaccess file in the ./site/eg installation directory do its work. If you want a starter config file for Apache::ASP, just look at the .htaccess file in the ./site/eg/ directory.

You will know that Apache::ASP is working normally if you can run the scripts in ./site/eg/ without any errors.

CONFIG

You may use a generic <Location> directive in your httpd.conf Apache configuration file to make Apache::ASP start ticking. Configure the optional setting if you want, the defaults are fine to get started. The settings are documented below. Make sure Global is set to where your web applications global.asa is if you have one!

<Location /asp/>    
 SetHandler perl-script
 PerlHandler Apache::ASP
 PerlSetVar Global /tmp
</Location>

NOTE: do not use this for the examples in ./site/eg. To get the examples working, check out the Quick Start section of INSTALL

You may also use the <Files ~ (\.asp)> tag in the httpd.conf Apache configuration file or .htaccess, which allows a developer to mix other file types in the application, static or otherwise. This method is more natural for ASP coding, with mixed media per directory.

Core

Global

Global is the nerve center of an ASP application, in which the global.asa may reside, which defines the web application's event handlers.

This directory is pushed onto @INC, you will be able to "use" and "require" files in this directory, so perl modules developed for this application may be dropped into this directory, for easy use.

Unless StateDir is configured, this directory must be some writeable directory by the web server. $Session and $Application object state files will be stored in this directory. If StateDir is configured, then ignore this paragraph, as it overrides the Global directory for this purpose.

Includes, specified with <!--#include file=somefile.inc--> or $Response->Include() syntax, may also be in this directory, please see section on includes for more information.

PerlSetVar Global /tmp

GlobalPackage

Perl package namespace that all scripts, includes, & global.asa events are compiled into. By default, GlobalPackage is some obscure name that is uniquely generated from the file path of the Global directory, and global.asa file. The use of explicitly naming the GlobalPackage is to allow scripts access to globals and subs defined in a perl module that is included with commands like:

in perl script: use Some::Package;
in apache conf: PerlModule Some::Package

PerlSetVar GlobalPackage Some::Package

UniquePackages

default 0. Set to 1 to emulate pre-v.10 ASP script compilation behavior, which compiles each script into its own perl package.

Before v.10, ASP scripts were compiled into their own perl package namespace. This allowed ASP scripts in the same ASP application to defined subroutines of the same name without a problem.

As of v.10, ASP scripts in a web application are compiled into the *same* perl package by default, so these scripts, their includes, and the global.asa events all share common globals & subroutines defined by each other. The problem for some developers was that they would at times define a subroutine of the same name in 2+ scripts, and one subroutine definition would redefine the other one because of the namespace collision.

PerlSetVar UniquePackages 0

DynamicIncludes

default 0. SSI file includes are normally inlined in the calling script, and the text gets compiled with the script as a whole. With this option set to TRUE, file includes are compiled as a separate subroutine and called when the script is run. The advantage of having this turned on is that the code compiled from the include can be shared between scripts, which keeps the script sizes smaller in memory, and keeps compile times down.

PerlSetVar DynamicIncludes 0

IncludesDir

no defaults. If set, this directory will also be used to look for includes when compiling scripts. By default the directory the script is in, and the Global directory are checked for includes.

This extension was added so that includes could be easily shared between ASP applications, whereas placing includes in the Global directory only allows sharing between scripts in an application.

PerlSetVar IncludesDir .

State Management

NoState

default 0, if true, neither the $Application nor $Session objects will be created. Use this for a performance increase. Please note that this setting takes precedence over the AllowSessionState and AllowApplicationState settings.

PerlSetVar NoState 0

AllowSessionState

Set to 0 for no session tracking, 1 by default If Session tracking is turned off, performance improves, but the $Session object is inaccessible.

PerlSetVar AllowSessionState 1    

AllowApplicationState

Default 1. If you want to leave $Application undefined, then set this to 0, for a performance increase of around 2-3%. Allowing use of $Application is less expensive than $Session, as there is more work for the StateManager associated with $Session garbage collection so this parameter should be only used for extreme tuning.

PerlSetVar AllowApplicationState 1

StateDir

default $Global/.state. State files for ASP application go to this directory. Where the state files go is the most important determinant in what makes a unique ASP application. Different configs pointing to the same StateDir are part of the same ASP application.

The default has not changed since implementing this config directive. The reason for this config option is to allow OS's with caching file systems like Solaris to specify a state directory separately from the Global directory, which contains more permanent files. This way one may point StateDir to /tmp/myaspapp, and make one's ASP application scream with speed.

PerlSetVar StateDir ./.state

StateManager

default 10, this number specifies the numbers of times per SessionTimeout that timed out sessions are garbage collected. The bigger the number, the slower your system, but the more precise Session_OnEnd's will be run from global.asa, which occur when a timed out session is cleaned up, and the better able to withstand Session guessing hacking attempts. The lower the number, the faster a normal system will run.

The defaults of 20 minutes for SessionTimeout and 10 times for StateManager, has dead Sessions being cleaned up every 2 minutes.

PerlSetVar StateManager 10

StateDB

default SDBM_File, this is the internal database used for state objects like $Application and $Session. Because an %sdbm_file hash has a limit on the size of a record / key value pair, usually 1024 bytes, you may want to use another tied database like DB_File.

With lightweight $Session and $Application use, you can get away with SDBM_File, but if you load it up with complex data like $Session{key} = { # very large complex object } you might max out the 1024 limit.

Currently StateDB can only be: SDBM_File, DB_File Please let me know if you would like to add any more to this list.

As of version .18, you may change this setting in a live production environment, and new state databases created will be of this format. With a prior version if you switch to a new StateDB, you would want to delete the old StateDir, as there will likely be incompatibilities between the different database formats, including the way garbage collection is handled.

PerlSetVar StateDB SDBM_File

StateCache

Default 0, set to 1 for lock files that are acquired for $Application and an internal database used for session management to be cached and held open between requests, for up to a 10% performance gain. Per ASP application this is will keep up to 2 extra file handles open per httpd process, one for the internal database, and one for $Application.

The only problem with this caching is that you can only delete the StateDir if you have first shutdown the web server, as the lock files will not be recreated between requests. Not that you should be deleting your StateDir anyway, but if you are, there is more to worry about.

PerlSetVar StateCache 0

StateSerializer

default Data::Dumper, you may set this to Storable for faster serialization and storage of data into state objects. This is particularly useful when storing large objects in $Session and $Application, as the Storable.pm module has a faster implementation of freezing and thawing data from and to perl structures. Note that if you are storing this much data in your state databases, you may want to use DB_File since it does not have the default 1024 byte limit that SDBM_File has on key/value lengths.

This configuration setting may be changed in production as the state database's serializer type is stored in the internal state manager which will always use Data::Dumper & SDBM_File to store data.

PerlSetVar StateSerializer Data::Dumper

Sessions

CookiePath

URL root that client responds to by sending the session cookie. If your asp application falls under the server url "/asp", then you would set this variable to /asp. This then allows you to run different applications on the same server, with different user sessions for each application.

PerlSetVar CookiePath /   

SessionTimeout

Default 20 minutes, when a user's session has been inactive for this period of time, the Session_OnEnd event is run, if defined, for that session, and the contents of that session are destroyed.

PerlSetVar SessionTimeout 20 

SecureSession

default 0. Sets the secure tag for the session cookie, so that the cookie will only be transmitted by the browser under https transmissions.

PerlSetVar SecureSession 1

ParanoidSession

default 0. When true, stores the user-agent header of the browser that creates the session and validates this against the session cookie presented. If this check fails, the session is killed, with the rationale that there is a hacking attempt underway.

This config option was implemented to be a smooth upgrade, as you can turn it off and on, without disrupting current sessions. Sessions must be created with this turned on for the security to take effect.

This config option is to help prevent a brute force cookie search from being successful. The number of possible cookies is huge, 2^128, thus making such a hacking attempt VERY unlikely. However, on the off chance that such an attack is successful, the hacker must also present identical browser headers to authenticate the session, or the session will be destroyed. Thus the User-Agent acts as a backup to the real session id. The IP address of the browser cannot be used, since because of proxies, IP addresses may change between requests during a session.

There are a few browsers that will not present a User-Agent header. These browsers are considered to be browsers of type "Unknown", and this method works the same way for them.

Most people agree that this level of security is unnecessary, thus it is titled paranoid :)

PerlSetVar ParanoidSession 0

SessionSerialize

default 0, if true, locks $Session for duration of script, which serializes requests to the $Session object. Only one script at a time may run, per user $Session, with sessions allowed.

Serialized requests to the session object is the Microsoft ASP way, but is dangerous in a production environment, where there is risk of long-running or run-away processes. If these things happen, a session may be locked for an indefinite period of time. A user STOP button should safely quit the session however.

PerlSetVar SessionSerialize 0

Cookieless Sessions

SessionQueryParse

default 0, if true, will automatically parse the $Session session id into the query string of each local URL found in the $Response buffer. For this setting to work therefore, buffering must be enabled. This parsing will only occur when a session cookie has not been sent by a browser, so the first script of a session enabled site, and scripts viewed by web browsers that have cookies disabled will trigger this behavior.

Although this runtime parsing method is computationally expensive, this cost should be amortized across most users that will not need this URL parsing. This is a lazy programmer's dream. For something more efficient, look at the SessionQuery setting. For more information about this solution, please read the COOKIES section.

PerlSetVar SessionQueryParse 0

SessionQueryParseMatch

default 0, set to a regexp pattern that matches all URLs that you want to have SessionQueryParse parse in session ids. By default SessionQueryParse only modifies local URLs, but if you name your URLs of your site with absolute URLs like http://localhost then you will need to use this setting. So to match http://localhost URLs, you might set this pattern to ^http://localhost. Note that by setting this config, you are also setting SessionQueryParse.

PerlSetVar SessionQueryParseMatch ^https?://localhost

SessionQuery

default 0, if set, the session id will be initialized from the $Request->QueryString if not first found as a cookie. You can use this setting coupled with the

$Server->URL($url, \%params) 

API extension to generate local URLs with session ids in their query strings, for efficient cookieless session support. Note that if a browser has cookies disabled, every URL to any page that needs access to $Session will need to be created by this method, unless you are using SessionQueryParse which will do this for you automatically.

PerlSetVar SessionQuery 0

SessionQueryMatch

default 0, set to a regexp pattern that will match URLs for $Server->URL() to add a session id to. SessionQuery normally allows $Server->URL() to add session ids just to local URLs, so if you use absolute URL references like http://localhost/ for your website, then just like with SessionQueryParseMatch, you might set this pattern to ^http://localhost

If this is set, then you don't need to set SessionQuery, as it will be set automatically.

PerlSetVar SessionQueryMatch ^http://localhost

Developer Environment

UseStrict

default 0, if set to 1, will compile all scripts, global.asa and includes with "use strict;" inserted at the head of the file, saving you from the painful process of strictifying code that was not strict to begin with.

Because of how essential "use strict" programming is in a mod_perl environment, this default might be set to 1 one day, but this will be up for discussion before that decision is made.

Note too that errors triggered by "use strict" are now captured as part of the normal Apache::ASP error handling when this configuration is set, otherwise "use strict" errors will not be handled properly, so using UseStrict is better than your own "use strict" statements.

PerlSetVar UseStrict 1

Debug

1 for server log debugging, 2 for extra client html output Use 1 for production debugging, use 2 for development. Turn off if you are not debugging.

PerlSetVar Debug 2	

DebugBufferLength

Default 100, set this to the number of bytes of the buffered output's tail you want to see when an error occurs and Debug 2 or MailErrorsTo is set, and when BufferingOn is enabled.

With buffering the script output will not naturally show up when the script errors, as it has been buffered by the $Response object. It helps to see where in the script output an error halted the script, so the last bytes of the buffered output are included with the rest of the debugging information.

For a demo of this functionality, try the ./site/eg/syntax_error.htm script, and turn buffering on.

PodComments

default 1. With pod comments turned on, perl pod style comments and documentation are parsed out of scripts at compile time. This make for great documentation and a nice debugging tool, and it lets you comment out perl code and html in blocks. Specifically text like this:

=pod
text or perl code here
=cut 

will get ripped out of the script before compiling. The =pod and =cut perl directives must be at the beginning of the line, and must be followed by the end of the line.

PerlSetVar PodComments 1

Miscellaneous

BufferingOn

default 1, if true, buffers output through the response object. $Response object will only send results to client browser if a $Response->Flush() is called, or if the asp script ends. Lots of output will need to be flushed incrementally.

If false, 0, the output is immediately written to the client, CGI style. There will be a performance hit server side if output is flushed automatically to the client, but is probably small.

I would leave this on, since error handling is poor, if your asp script errors after sending only some of the output.

PerlSetVar BufferingOn 1

StatINC

default 0, if true, reloads perl libraries that have changed on disk automatically for ASP scripts. If false, the www server must be restarted for library changes to take effect.

A known bug is that any functions that are exported, e.g. confess Carp qw(confess), will not be refreshed by StatINC. To refresh these, you must restart the www server.

This setting should be used in development only because it is so slow. For a production version of StatINC, see StatINCMatch.

PerlSetVar StatINC 1

StatINCMatch

default undef, if defined, it will be used as a regular expression to reload modules that match as in StatINC. This is useful because StatINC has a very high performance penalty in production, so if you can narrow the modules that are checked for reloading each script execution to a handful, you will only suffer a mild performance penalty.

The StatINCMatch setting should be a regular expression like: Struct|LWP which would match on reloading Class/Struct.pm, and all the LWP/.* libraries.

If you define StatINCMatch, you do not need to define StatINC.

PerlSetVar StatINCMatch .*

StatScripts

default 1, if set to 0, changed scripts, global.asa, and includes will not be reloaded. Coupled with Apache mod_perl startup and restart handlers executing Apache::ASP->Loader() for your application this allows your application to be frozen, and only reloaded on the next server restart or stop/start.

There are a few advantages for not reloading scripts and modules in production. First there is a slight performance improvement by not having to stat() the script, its includes and the global.asa every request.

From an application deployment standpoint, you also gain the ability to deploy your application as a snapshot taken when the server starts and restarts. This provides you with the reassurance that during a production server update from development sources, you do not have to worry with sources being used for the wrong libraries and such, while they are all being copied over.

Finally, though you really should not do this, you can work on a live production application, with a test server reloading changes, but your production server does see the changes until you restart or stop/start it. This saves your public from syntax errors while you are just doing a quick bug fix.

PerlSetVar StatScripts 1

SoftRedirect

default 0, if true, a $Response->Redirect() does not end the script. Normally, when a Redirect() is called, the script is ended automatically. SoftRedirect 1, is a standard way of doing redirects, allowing for html output after the redirect is specified.

PerlSetVar SoftRedirect 0

Filter

On/Off, default Off. With filtering enabled, you can take advantage of full server side includes (SSI), implemented through Apache::SSI. SSI is implemented through this mechanism by using Apache::Filter. A sample configuration for full SSI with filtering is in the ./site/eg/.htaccess file, with a relevant example script ./site/eg/ssi_filter.ssi.

You may only use this option with modperl v1.16 or greater installed and PERL_STACKED_HANDLERS enabled. Filtering may be used in conjunction with other handlers that are also "filter aware".

With filtering through Apache::SSI, you should expect at least a 20% performance decrease, increasing as your files get bigger, increasing the work that SSI must do.

PerlSetVar Filter Off

CgiHeaders

default 0. When true, script output that looks like HTTP / CGI headers, will be added to the HTTP headers of the request. So you could add: Set-Cookie: test=message

<html>...
to the top of your script, and all the headers preceding a newline
will be added as if with a call to $Response->AddHeader().  This
functionality is here for compatibility with raw cgi scripts,
and those used to this kind of coding.

When set to 0, CgiHeaders style headers will not be parsed from the script response.

PerlSetVar CgiHeaders 0

Clean

default 0, may be set between 1 and 9. This setting determine how much text/html output should be compressed. A setting of 1 strips mostly white space saving usually 10% in output size, at a performance cost of less than 5%. A setting of 9 goes much further saving anywhere 25% to 50% typically, but with a performance hit of 50%.

This config option is implemented via HTML::Clean. Per script configuration of this setting is available via the $Response->{Clean} property, which may also be set between 0 and 9.

PerlSetVar Clean 0

Mail Administration

MailHost

The mail host is the smtp server that the below Mail* config directives will use when sending their emails. By default Net::SMTP uses smtp mail hosts configured in Net::Config, which is set up at install time, but this setting can be used to override this config.

The mail hosts specified in the Net::Config file will be used as backup smtp servers to the MailHost specified here, should this primary server not be working.

PerlSetVar MailHost smtp.yourdomain.com

MailErrorsTo

No default, if set, ASP server errors, error code 500, that result while compiling or running scripts under Apache::ASP will automatically be emailed to the email address set for this config. This allows an administrator to have a rapid response to user generated server errors resulting from bugs in production ASP scripts. Other errors, such as 404 not found will be handled by Apache directly.

An easy way to see this config in action is to have an ASP script which calls a die(), which generates an internal ASP 500 server error.

The Debug config of value 2 and this setting are mutually exclusive, as Debug 2 is a development setting where errors are displayed in the browser, and MailErrorsTo is a production setting so that errors are silently logged and sent via email to the web admin.

PerlSetVar MailErrorsTo youremail@yourdomain.com

MailAlertTo

The address configured will have an email sent on any ASP server error 500, and the message will be short enough to fit on a text based pager. This config setting would be used to give an administrator a heads up that a www server error occurred, as opposed to MailErrorsTo would be used for debugging that server error.

This config does not work when Debug 2 is set, as it is a setting for use in production only, where Debug 2 is for development use.

PerlSetVar MailAlertTo youremail@yourdomain.com

MailAlertPeriod

Default 20 minutes, this config specifies the time in minutes over which there may be only one alert email generated by MailAlertTo. The purpose of MailAlertTo is to give the admin a heads up that there is an error at the www server. MailErrorsTo is for to aid in speedy debugging of the incident.

PerlSetVar MailAlertPeriod 20

File Uploads

FileUploadMax

default 0, if set will limit file uploads to this size in bytes. This is currently implemented by setting $CGI::POST_MAX before handling the file upload. Prior to this, a developer would have to hardcode a value for $CGI::POST_MAX to get this to work.

PerlSetVar 100000

FileUploadTemp

default 0, if set will leave a temp file on disk during the request, which may be helpful for processing by other programs, but is also a security risk in that other users on the operating system could potentially read this file while the script is running.

The path to the temp file will be available at $Request->{FileUpload}{$form_field}{TempFile}. The regular use of file uploads remains the same with the <$filehandle> to the upload at $Request->{Form}{$form_field}. Please see the CGI section for more information on file uploads, and the $Request section in OBJECTS.

PerlSetVar FileUploadTemp 0

SYNTAX

ASP embedding syntax allows one to embed code in html in 2 simple ways. The first is the <% xxx %> tag in which xxx is any valid perl code. The second is <%= xxx %> where xxx is some scalar value that will be inserted into the html directly. An easy print.

  A simple asp page would look like:
  
  <!-- sample here -->
  <html>
  <body>
  For loop incrementing font size: <p>
  <% for(1..5) { %>
	<!-- iterated html text -->
	<font size="<%=$_%>" > Size = <%=$_%> </font> <br>
  <% } %>
  </body>
  </html>
  <!-- end sample here -->

Notice that your perl code blocks can span any html. The for loop above iterates over the html without any special syntax.

EVENTS

The ASP platform allows developers to create Web Applications. In fulfillment of real software requirements, ASP allows event-triggered actions to be taken, which are defined in a global.asa file. The global.asa file resides in the Global directory, defined as a config option , and may define the following actions:

	Action			Event
	------			------
        Script_OnStart *	Beginning of Script execution
        Script_OnEnd *		End of Script execution
	Application_OnStart	Beginning of Application
	Application_OnEnd	End of Application
	Session_OnStart		Beginning of user Session.
	Session_OnEnd		End of user Session.

  * These are API extensions that are not portable, but were
    added because they are incredibly useful

These actions must be defined in the $Global/global.asa file as subroutines, for example:

sub Session_OnStart {
    $Application->{$Session->SessionID()} = started;
}

Sessions are easy to understand. When visiting a page in a web application, each user has one unique $Session. This session expires, after which the user will have a new $Session upon revisiting.

A web application starts when the user visits a page in that application, and has a new $Session created. Right before the first $Session is created, the $Application is created. When the last user $Session expires, that $Application expires also.

Script_OnStart & Script_OnEnd

The script events are used to run any code for all scripts in an application defined by a global.asa. Often, you would like to run the same code for every script, which you would otherwise have to add by hand, or add with a file include, but with these events, just add your code to the global.asa, and it will be run.

There is one caveat. Code in Script_OnEnd is not guaranteed to be run when the user hits a STOP button, since the program execution ends immediately at this event. To always run critical code, use the API extension:

$Server->RegisterCleanup()

Application_OnStart

This event marks the beginning of an ASP application, and is run just before the Session_OnStart of the first Session of an application. This event is useful to load up $Application with data that will be used in all user sessions.

Application_OnEnd

The end of the application is marked by this event, which is run after the last user session has timed out for a given ASP application.

Session_OnStart

Triggered by the beginning of a user's session, Session_OnStart gets run before the user's executing script, and if the same session recently timed out, after the session's triggered Session_OnEnd.

The Session_OnStart is particularly useful for caching database data, and avoids having the caching handled by clumsy code inserted into each script being executed.

Session_OnEnd

Triggered by a user session ending, Session_OnEnd can be useful for cleaning up and analyzing user data accumulated during a session.

Sessions end when the session timeout expires, and the StateManager performs session cleanup. The timing of the Session_OnEnd does not occur immediately after the session times out, but when the first script runs after the session expires, and the StateManager allows for that session to be cleaned up.

So on a busy site with default SessionTimeout (20 minutes) and StateManager (10 times) settings, the Session_OnEnd for a particular session should be run near 22 minutes past the last activity that Session saw. A site infrequently visited will only have the Session_OnEnd run when a subsequent visit occurs, and theoretically the last session of an application ever run will never have its Session_OnEnd run.

Thus I would not put anything mission-critical in the Session_OnEnd, just stuff that would be nice to run whenever it gets run.

OBJECTS

The beauty of the ASP Object Model is that it takes the burden of CGI and Session Management off the developer, and puts them in objects accessible from any ASP script & include. For the perl programmer, treat these objects as globals accessible from anywhere in your ASP application.

Currently the Apache::ASP object model supports the following:

  Object	 -	Function
  ------		--------
  $Session	 -	user session state
  $Response	 -	output to browser
  $Request	 -	input from browser
  $Application -	application state
  $Server	 -	general support methods

These objects, and their methods are further defined in the following sections.

$Session Object

The $Session object keeps track of user and web client state, in a persistent manner, making it relatively easy to develop web applications. The $Session state is stored across HTTP connections, in database files in the Global or StateDir directories, and will persist across web server restarts.

The user session is referenced by a 128 bit / 32 byte MD5 hex hashed cookie, and can be considered secure from session id guessing, or session hijacking. When a hacker fails to guess a session, the system times out for a second, and with 2**128 (3.4e38) keys to guess, a hacker will not be guessing an id any time soon.

If an incoming cookie matches a timed out or non-existent session, a new session is created with the incoming id. If the id matches a currently active session, the session is tied to it and returned. This is also similar to the Microsoft ASP implementation.

The $Session reference is a hash ref, and can be used as such to store data as in:

$Session->{count}++;	# increment count by one
%{$Session} = ();	# clear $Session data

The $Session object state is implemented through MLDBM, and a user should be aware of the limitations of MLDBM. Basically, you can read complex structures, but not write them, directly:

$data = $Session->{complex}{data};     # Read ok.
$Session->{complex}{data} = $data;     # Write NOT ok.
$Session->{complex} = {data => $data}; # Write ok, all at once.

Please see MLDBM for more information on this topic. $Session can also be used for the following methods and properties:

$Session->{CodePage}

Not implemented. May never be until someone needs it.

$Session->{LCID}

Not implemented. May never be until someone needs it.

$Session->{SessionID}

SessionID property, returns the id for the current session, which is exchanged between the client and the server as a cookie.

$Session->{Timeout} [= $minutes]

Timeout property, if minutes is being assigned, sets this default timeout for the user session, else returns the current session timeout.

If a user session is inactive for the full timeout, the session is destroyed by the system. No one can access the session after it times out, and the system garbage collects it eventually.

$Session->Abandon()

The abandon method times out the session immediately. All Session data is cleared in the process, just as when any session times out.

$Session->Lock()

API extension. If you are about to use $Session for many consecutive reads or writes, you can improve performance by explicitly locking $Session, and then unlocking, like:

$Session->Lock();
$Session->{count}++;
$Session->{count}++;
$Session->{count}++;
$Session->UnLock();  

This sequence causes $Session to be locked and unlocked only 1 time, instead of the 6 times that it would be locked otherwise, 2 for each increment with one to read and one to write.

Because of flushing issues with SDBM_File and DB_File databases, each lock actually ties fresh to the database, so the performance savings here can be considerable.

Note that if you have SessionSerialize set, $Session is already locked for each script invocation automatically, as if you had called $Session->Lock() in Script_OnStart. Thus you do not need to worry about $Session locking for performance. Please read the section on SessionSerialize for more info.

$Session->UnLock()

API Extension. Unlocks the $Session explicitly. If you do not call this, $Session will be unlocked automatically at the end of the script.

$Response Object

This object manages the output from the ASP Application and the client web browser. It does not store state information like the $Session object but does have a wide array of methods to call.

$Response->{Buffer}

Default 1, when TRUE sends output from script to client only at the end of processing the script. When 0, response is not buffered, and client is sent output as output is generated by the script.

$Response->{CacheControl}

Default "private", when set to public allows proxy servers to cache the content. This setting controls the value set in the HTTP header Cache-Control

$Response->{Charset}

This member when set appends itself to the value of the Content-Length HTTP header. If $Response->{Charset} = 'ISO-LATIN-1' is set, the corresponding header would look like:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-LATIN-1

$Response->{Clean} = 0-9;

API extension. Set the Clean level, default 0, on a per script basis. Clean of 1-9 compresses text/html output. Please see the Clean config option for more information.

$Response->{ContentType} = "text/html"

Sets the MIME type for the current response being sent to the client. Sent as an HTTP header.

$Response->{Expires} = $time

Sends a response header to the client indicating the $time in SECONDS in which the document should expire. A time of 0 means immediate expiration. The header generated is a standard HTTP date like: "Wed, 09 Feb 1994 22:23:32 GMT".

$Response->{ExpiresAbsolute} = $date

Sends a response header to the client with $date being an absolute time to expire. Formats accepted are all those accepted by HTTP::Date::str2time(), e.g.

"Wed, 09 Feb 1994 22:23:32 GMT"     -- HTTP format
"Tuesday, 08-Feb-94 14:15:29 GMT"   -- old rfc850 HTTP format

"08-Feb-94"       -- old rfc850 HTTP format    
"09 Feb 1994"     -- proposed new HTTP format  

"Feb  3  1994"    -- Unix 'ls -l' format
"Feb  3 17:03"    -- Unix 'ls -l' format

$Response->{IsClientConnected}

Not implemented, but returns 1 currently for portability. This is value is not yet relevant, and may not be until apache 1.3.6, which will be tested shortly. Apache versions less than 1.3.6 abort the perl code immediately upon the client dropping the connection.

$Response->{PICS}

If this property has been set, a PICS-Label HTTP header will be sent with its value. For those that do not know, PICS is a header that is useful in rating the internet. It stands for Platform for Internet Content Selection, and you can find more info about it at: http://www.w3.org

$Response->{Status} = $status

Sets the status code returned by the server. Can be used to set messages like 500, internal server error

$Response->AddHeader($name, $value)

Adds a custom header to a web page. Headers are sent only before any text from the main page is sent, so if you want to set a header after some text on a page, you must turn BufferingOn.

$Response->AppendToLog($message)

Adds $message to the server log. Useful for debugging.

$Response->BinaryWrite($data)

Writes binary data to the client. The only difference from $Response->Write() is that $Response->Flush() is called internally first, so the data cannot be parsed as an html header. Flushing flushes the header if has not already been written.

If you have set the $Response->{ContentType} to something other than text/html, cgi header parsing (see CGI notes), will be automatically be turned off, so you will not necessarily need to use BinaryWrite for writing binary data.

For an example of BinaryWrite, see the binary_write.htm example in ./site/eg/binary_write.htm

Please note that if you are on Win32, you will need to call binmode on a file handle before reading, if its data is binary.

$Response->Clear()

Erases buffered ASP output.

$Response->Cookies($name, [$key,] $value)

Sets the key or attribute of cookie with name $name to the value $value. If $key is not defined, the Value of the cookie is set. ASP CookiePath is assumed to be / in these examples.

 $Response->Cookies('name', 'value'); 
  --> Set-Cookie: name=value; path=/

 $Response->Cookies("Test", "data1", "test value");     
 $Response->Cookies("Test", "data2", "more test");      
 $Response->Cookies(
	"Test", "Expires", 
	&HTTP::Date::time2str(time+86400)
	); 
 $Response->Cookies("Test", "Secure", 1);               
 $Response->Cookies("Test", "Path", "/");
 $Response->Cookies("Test", "Domain", "host.com");
  -->	Set-Cookie:Test=data1=test%20value&data2=more%20test;	\
 		expires=Fri, 23 Apr 1999 07:19:52 GMT;		\
 		path=/; domain=host.com; secure

The latter use of $key in the cookies not only sets cookie attributes such as Expires, but also treats the cookie as a hash of key value pairs which can later be accesses by

$Request->Cookies('Test', 'data1');
$Request->Cookies('Test', 'data2');

Because this is perl, you can (NOT PORTABLE) reference the cookies directly through hash notation. The same 5 commands above could be compressed to:

 $Response->{Cookies}{Test} = 
	{ 
		Secure	=> 1, 
		Value	=>	
			{
				data1 => 'test value', 
				data2 => 'more test'
			},
		Expires	=> 86400, # not portable, see above
		Domain	=> 'host.com',
		Path    => '/'
	};

and the first command would be:

# you don't need to use hash notation when you are only setting 
# a simple value
$Response->{Cookies}{'Test Name'} = 'Test Value'; 

I prefer the hash notation for cookies, as this looks nice, and is quite perlish. It is here to stay. The Cookie() routine is very complex and does its best to allow access to the underlying hash structure of the data. This is the best emulation I could write trying to match the Collections functionality of cookies in IIS ASP.

For more information on Cookies, please go to the source at http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

$Response->Debug(@args)

API Extension. If the Debug config option is set greater than 0, this routine will write @args out to server error log. refs in @args will be expanded one level deep, so data in simple data structures like one-level hash refs and array refs will be displayed. CODE refs like

$Response->Debug(sub { "some value" });

will be executed and their output added to the debug output. This extension allows the user to tie directly into the debugging capabilities of this module.

While developing an app on a production server, it is often useful to have a separate error log for the application to catch debugging output separately. One way of implementing this is to use the Apache ErrorLog configuration directive to create a separate error log for a virtual host.

If you want further debugging support, like stack traces in your code, consider doing things like:

$Response->Debug( sub { Carp::longmess('debug trace') };
$SIG{__WARN__} = \&Carp::cluck; # then warn() will stack trace

The only way at present to see exactly where in your script an error occurred is to set the Debug config directive to 2, and match the error line number to perl script generated from your ASP script.

However, as of version 0.10, the perl script generated from the asp script should match almost exactly line by line, except in cases of inlined includes, which add to the text of the original script, pod comments which are entirely yanked out, and <% # comment %> style comments which have a \n added to them so they still work.

If you would like to see the HTML preceding an error while developing, consider setting the BufferingOn config directive to 0.

$Response->End()

Sends result to client, and immediately exits script. Automatically called at end of script, if not already called.

$Response->ErrorDocument($code, $uri)

API extension that allows for the modification the Apache ErrorDocument at runtime. $uri may be a on site document, off site URL, or string containing the error message.

This extension is useful if you want to have scripts set error codes with $Response->{Status} like 401 for authentication failure, and to then control from the script what the error message looks like.

For more information on the Apache ErrorDocument mechanism, please see ErrorDocument in the CORE Apache settings, and the Apache->custom_response() API, for which this method is a wrapper.

$Response->Flush()

Sends buffered output to client and clears buffer.

$Response->Include($filename, @args)

This API extension calls the routine compiled from asp script in $filename with the args @args. This is a direct translation of the SSI tag

<!--#include file=$filename args=@args-->

Please see the SSI section for more on SSI in general.

This API extension was created to allow greater modularization of code by allowing includes to be called with runtime arguments. Files included are compiled once, and the anonymous code ref from that compilation is cached, thus including a file in this manner is just like calling a perl subroutine.

$Response->Redirect($url)

Sends the client a command to go to a different url $url. Script immediately ends.

$Response->Write($data)

Write output to the HTML page. <%=$data%> syntax is shorthand for a $Response->Write($data). All final output to the client must at some point go through this method.

$Request Object

The request object manages the input from the client browser, like posts, query strings, cookies, etc. Normal return results are values if an index is specified, or a collection / perl hash ref if no index is specified. WARNING, the latter property is not supported in ActiveState PerlScript, so if you use the hashes returned by such a technique, it will not be portable.

A normal use of this feature would be to iterate through the form variables in the form hash...

 $form = $Request->Form();
 for(keys %{$form}) {
	$Response->Write("$_: $form->{$_}<br>\n");
 }

Please see the ./site/eg/server_variables.htm asp file for this method in action.

Note that if a form POST or query string contains duplicate values for a key, those values will be returned through normal use of the $Request object:

@values = $Request->Form('key');

but you can also access the internal storage, which is an array reference like so:

$array_ref = $Request->{Form}{'key'};
@values = @{$array_ref};

Please read the PERLSCRIPT section for more information on how things like $Request->QueryString() & $Request->Form() behave as collections.

$Request->{TotalBytes}

The amount of data sent by the client in the body of the request, usually the length of the form data. This is the same value as $Request->ServerVariables('CONTENT_LENGTH')

$Request->BinaryRead($length)

Returns a scalar whose contents are the first $length bytes of the form data, or body, sent by the client request. This data is the raw data sent by the client, without any parsing done on it by Apache::ASP.

$Request->ClientCertificate()

Not implemented.

$Request->Cookies($name [,$key])

Returns the value of the Cookie with name $name. If a $key is specified, then a lookup will be done on the cookie as if it were a query string. So, a cookie set by:

Set-Cookie: test=data1=1&data2=2

would have a value of 2 returned by $Request->Cookies('test','data2').

If no name is specified, a hash will be returned of cookie names as keys and cookie values as values. If the cookie value is a query string, it will automatically be parsed, and the value will be a hash reference to these values.

When in doubt, try it out. Remember that unless you set the Expires attribute of a cookie with $Response->Cookies('cookie', 'Expires', $xyz), the cookies that you set will only last until you close your browser, so you may find your self opening & closing your browser a lot when debugging cookies.

For more information on cookies in ASP, please read $Response->Cookies()

$Request->FileUpload($form_field, $key)

API extension. The FileUpload interface to file upload data is stabilized. The internal representation of the file uploads is a hash of hashes, one hash per file upload found in the $Request->Form() colletion. This collection of collections may be queried through the normal interface like so:

$Request->FileUpload('upload_file', 'ContentType');
$Request->FileUpload('upload_file', 'FileHandle');
$Request->FileUpload('upload_file', 'BrowserFile');
$Request->FileUpload('upload_file', 'Mime-Header');
$Request->FileUpload('upload_file', 'TempFile');

* note that TempFile must be use with the UploadTempFile 
  configuration setting.

The above represents the old slow collection interface, but like all collections in Apache::ASP, you can reference the internal hash representation more easily.

my $fileup = $Request->{FileUpload}{upload_file};
$fileup->{ContentType};
$fileup->{BrowserFile};
$fileup->{FileHandle};
$fileup->{Mime-Header};
$fileup->{TempFile};

$Request->Form($name)

Returns the value of the input of name $name used in a form with POST method. If $name is not specified, returns a ref to a hash of all the form data.

File upload data will be loaded into $Request->Form('file_field'), where the value is the actual file name of the file uploaded, and the contents of the file can be found by reading from the file name as a file handle as in:

while(read($Request->Form('file_field_name'), $data, 1024)) {};

For more information, please see the CGI / File Upload section, as file uploads are implemented via the CGI.pm module. An example can be found in the installation samples ./site/eg/file_upload.asp

$Request->QueryString($name)

Returns the value of the input of name $name used in a form with GET method, or passed by appending a query string to the end of a url as in http://localhost/?data=value. If $name is not specified, returns a ref to a hash of all the query string data.

$Request->ServerVariables($name)

Returns the value of the server variable / environment variable with name $name. If $name is not specified, returns a ref to a hash of all the server / environment variables data. The following would be a common use of this method:

$env = $Request->ServerVariables();
# %{$env} here would be equivalent to the cgi %ENV in perl.

$Application Object

Like the $Session object, you may use the $Application object to store data across the entire life of the application. Every page in the ASP application always has access to this object. So if you wanted to keep track of how many visitors there where to the application during its lifetime, you might have a line like this:

$Application->{num_users}++

The Lock and Unlock methods are used to prevent simultaneous access to the $Application object.

$Application->Lock()

Locks the Application object for the life of the script, or until UnLock() unlocks it, whichever comes first. When $Application is locked, this guarantees that data being read and written to it will not suddenly change on you between the reads and the writes.

This and the $Session object both lock automatically upon every read and every write to ensure data integrity. This lock is useful for concurrent access control purposes.

Be careful to not be too liberal with this, as you can quickly create application bottlenecks with its improper use.

$Application->UnLock()

Unlocks the $Application object. If already unlocked, does nothing.

$Application->GetSession($sess_id)

This NON-PORTABLE API extension returns a user $Session given a session id. This allows one to easily write a session manager if session ids are stored in $Application during Session_OnStart, with full access to these sessions for administrative purposes.

Be careful not to expose full session ids over the net, as they could be used by a hacker to impersonate another user. So when creating a session manager, for example, you could create some other id to reference the SessionID internally, which would allow you to control the sessions. This kind of application would best be served under a secure web server.

The ./site/eg/global_asa_demo.asp script makes use of this routine to display all the data in current user sessions.

$Application->SessionCount()

This NON-PORTABLE method returns the current number of active sessions, in the application. This method is not implemented as part of the ASP object model, but is implemented here because it is useful. In particular, when accessing databases with license requirements, one can monitor usage effectively through accessing this value.

This is a new feature as of v.06, and if run on a site with previous versions of Apache::ASP, the count may take a while to synch up. To ensure a correct count, you must delete all the current state files associated with an application, usually in the $Global/.state directory.

$Server Object

The server object is that object that handles everything the other objects do not. The best part of the server object for Win32 users is the CreateObject method which allows developers to create instances of ActiveX components, like the ADO component.

$Server->{ScriptTimeout} = $seconds

Not implemented. May never be. Please see the Apache Timeout configuration option, normally in httpd.conf.

$Server->CreateObject($program_id)

Allows use of ActiveX objects on Win32. This routine returns a reference to an Win32::OLE object upon success, and nothing upon failure. It is through this mechanism that a developer can utilize ADO. The equivalent syntax in VBScript is

Set object = Server.CreateObject(program_id)

For further information, try 'perldoc Win32::OLE' from your favorite command line.

$Server->HTMLEncode($string)

Returns an HTML escapes version of $string. &, ", >, <, are each escapes with their HTML equivalents. Strings encoded in this nature should be raw text displayed to an end user, as HTML tags become escaped with this method. "

$Server->MapPath($url);

Given the url $url, absolute, or relative to the current executing script, this method returns the equivalent filename that the server would translate the request to, regardless or whether the request would be valid.

Only a $url that is relative to the host is valid. Urls like "." and "/" are fine arguments to MapPath, but http://localhost would not be.

To see this method call in action, check out the sample ./site/eg/server.htm script.

$Server->URLEncode($string)

Returns the URL-escaped version of the string $string. +'s are substituted in for spaces and special characters are escaped to the ascii equivalents. Strings encoded in this manner are safe to put in urls... they are especially useful for encoding data used in a query string as in:

$data = $Server->URLEncode("test data");
$url = "http://localhost?data=$data";

$url evaluates to http://localhost?data=test+data, and is a 
valid URL for use in anchor <a> tags and redirects, etc.

$Server->RegisterCleanup($sub)

non-portable extension

Sets a subroutine reference to be executed after the script ends, whether normally or abnormally, the latter occurring possibly by the user hitting the STOP button, or the web server being killed. This subroutine must be a code reference created like:

$Server->RegisterCleanup(sub { $main::Session->{served}++; });
  or
sub served { $main::Session->{served}++; }
$Server->RegisterCleanup(\&served);

The reference to the subroutine passed in will be executed. Though the subroutine will be executed in anonymous context, instead of the script, all objects will still be defined in main::*, that you would reference normally in your script. Output written to $main::Response will have no affect at this stage, as the request to the www client has already completed.

Check out the ./site/eg/register_cleanup.asp script for an example of this routine in action.

$Server->URL($url, \%params)

Will return a URL with %params serialized into a query string like:

$url = $Server->URL('test.asp', { test => value });

which would give you a URL of test.asp?test=value

Used in conjunction with the SessionQuery* settings, the returned URL will also have the session id inserted into the query string, making this a critical part of that method of implementing cookieless sessions. For more information on that topic please read on the the setting in the CONFIG section, and the COOKIES section too.

SSI

SSI is great! One of the main features of SSI is to include other files in the script being requested. In Apache::ASP, this is implemented in a couple ways, the most crucial of which is implemented in the file include. Formatted as

<!--#include file=filename.inc-->

,the .inc being merely a convention, text from the included file will be inserted directly into the script being executed and the script will be compiled as a whole. Whenever the script or any of its includes change, the script will be recompiled.

Includes go a great length to promote good decomposition and code sharing in ASP scripts, but they are still fairly static. As of version .09, includes may have dynamic runtime execution, as subroutines compiled into the global.asa namespace. The first way to invoke includes dynamically is

<!--#include file=filename.inc args=@args-->

If @args is specified, Apache::ASP knows to execute the include at runtime instead of inlining it directly into the compiled code of the script. It does this by compiling the script at runtime as a subroutine, and caching it for future invocations. Then the compiled subroutine is executed and has @args passed into its as arguments.

This is still might be too static for some, as @args is still hardcoded into the ASP script, so finally, one may execute an include at runtime by utilizing this API extension

$Response->Include("filename.inc", @args);

which is a direct translation of the dynamic include above.

Although inline includes should be a little faster, runtime dynamic includes represent great potential savings in httpd memory, as includes are shared between scripts keeping the size of each script to a minimum. This can often be significant saving if much of the formatting occurs in an included header of a www page.

By default, all includes will be inlined unless called with an args parameter. However, if you want all your includes to be compiled as subs and dynamically executed at runtime, turn the DynamicIncludes config option on as documented above.

That is not all! SSI is full featured. One of the things missing above is the

<!--#include virtual=filename.cgi-->

tag. This and many other SSI code extensions are available by filtering Apache::ASP output through Apache::SSI via the Apache::Filter and the Filter config options. For more information on how to wire Apache::ASP and Apache::SSI together, please see the Filter config option documented above. Also please see Apache::SSI for further information on the capabilities it offers.

EXAMPLES

Use with Apache. Copy the ./site/eg directory from the ASP installation to your Apache document tree and try it out! You have to put "AllowOverride All" in your <Directory> config section to let the .htaccess file in the ./site/eg installation directory do its work.

IMPORTANT (FAQ): Make sure that the web server has write access to that directory. Usually a

chmod -R 0777 eg

will do the trick :)

CGI

CGI has been the standard way of deploying web applications long before ASP came along. CGI.pm is a very useful module that aids developers in the building of these applications, and Apache::ASP has been made to be compatible with function calls in CGI.pm. Please see cgi.htm in the ./site/eg directory for a sample ASP script written almost entirely in CGI.

As of version 0.09, use of CGI.pm for both input and output is seamless when working under Apache::ASP. Thus if you would like to port existing cgi scripts over to Apache::ASP, all you need to do is wrap <% %> around the script to get going. This functionality has been implemented so that developers may have the best of both worlds when building their web applications.

Following are some special notes with respect to compatibility with CGI. Use of CGI.pm in any of these ways was made possible through a great amount of work, and is not guaranteed to be portable with other perl ASP implementations, as other ASP implementations will likely be more limited.

Query Object Initialization

You may create a CGI.pm $query object like so:

use CGI;
my $query = new CGI;

As of Apache::ASP version 0.09, form input may be read in by CGI.pm upon initialization. Before, Apache::ASP would consume the form input when reading into $Request->Form(), but now form input is cached, and may be used by CGI.pm input routines.

CGI headers

Not only can you use the CGI.pm $query->header() method to put out headers, but with the CgiHeaders config option set to true, you can also print "Header: value\n", and add similar lines to the top of your script, like:

Some-Header: Value
Some-Other: OtherValue

<html><body> Script body starts here.

Once there are no longer any cgi style headers, or the there is a newline, the body of the script begins. So if you just had an asp script like:

print join(":", %{$Request->QueryString});

You would likely end up with no output, as that line is interpreted as a header because of the semicolon. When doing basic debugging, as long as you start the page with <html> you will avoid this problem.

print()ing CGI

CGI is notorious for its print() statements, and the functions in CGI.pm usually return strings to print(). You can do this under Apache::ASP, since print just aliases to $Response->Write(). Note that $| has no affect.

print $query->header();
print $query->start_form();

File Upload

CGI.pm is used for implementing reading the input from file upload. You may create the file upload form however you wish, and then the data may be recovered from the file upload by using $Request->Form(). Data from a file upload gets written to a file handle, that may in turn be read from. The original file name that was uploaded is the name of the file handle.

my $filehandle = $Request->Form('file_upload_field_name');
print $filehandle; # will get you the file name
my $data;
while(read($filehandle, $data, 1024)) {
	# data from the uploaded file read into $data
};

Please see the docs on CGI.pm (try perldoc CGI) for more information on this topic, and ./site/eg/file_upload.asp for an example of its use.

There is a $Request->FileUpload() API extension that you can use to get more data about a file upload, so that the following properties are available for querying:

my $file_upload = $Request->{FileUpload}{upload_field};
$file_upload->{BrowserFile}
$file_upload->{FileHandle}
$file_upload->{ContentType}

# only if FileUploadTemp is set
$file_upload->{TempFile}	

# whatever mime headers are sent with the file upload
# just "keys %$file_upload" to find out
$file_upload->{?Mime-Header?}

Please see the $Request section in OBJECTS for more information.

PERLSCRIPT

Much work has been done to bring compatibility with ASP applications written in PerlScript under IIS. Most of that work revolved around bringing a Win32::OLE Collection interface to many of the objects in Apache::ASP, which are natively written as perl hashes.

The following objects in Apache::ASP respond as Collections:

        $Application
	$Session
	$Request->FileUpload *
	$Request->FileUpload('upload_file') *
	$Request->Form
	$Request->QueryString
	$Request->Cookies
	$Response->Cookies
	$Response->Cookies('some_cookie')	

  * FileUpload API Extensions

And as such may be used with the following syntax, as compared with the Apache::ASP native calls. Please note the native Apache::ASP interface is compatible with the deprecated PerlScript interface.

 C = PerlScript Compatibility	N = Native Apache::ASP 
  
 ## Collection->Contents($name) 
 [C] $Application->Contents('XYZ')		
 [N] $Application->{XYZ}

 ## Collection->SetProperty($property, $name, $value)
 [C] $Application->Contents->SetProperty('Item', 'XYZ', "Fred");
 [N] $Application->{XYZ} = "Fred"
	
 ## Collection->GetProperty($property, $name)
 [C] $Application->Contents->GetProperty('Item', 'XYZ')		
 [N] $Application->{XYZ}

 ## Collection->Item($name)
 [C] print $Request->QueryString->Item('message'), "<br>\n\n";
 [N] print $Request->{QueryString}{'message'}, "<br>\n\n";		

 ## Working with Cookies
 [C] $Response->SetProperty('Cookies', 'Testing', 'Extra');
 [C] $Response->SetProperty('Cookies', 'Testing', {'Path' => '/'});
 [C] print $Request->Cookies(Testing) . "<br>\n";
 [N] $Response->{Cookies}{Testing} = {Value => Extra, Path => '/'};
 [N] print $Request->{Cookies}{Testing} . "<br>\n";

Several incompatibilities exist between PerlScript and Apache::ASP:

> Collection->{Count} property has not been implemented.
> VBScript dates may not be used for Expires property of cookies.
> Win32::OLE::in may not be used.  Use keys() to iterate over.
> The ->{Item} property does not work, use the ->Item() method.

COOKIES

Cookies are used by default for user $Session support ( see OBJECTS ). In order to track a web user and associate server side data with that client, the web server sets, and the web client returns a 32 byte session id identifier cookie. This implementation is very secure and may be used in secure HTTPS transactions, and made stronger with SecureSession and ParanoidSession settings (see CONFIG ).

However good cookies are for this kind of persistent state management between HTTP requests, they have long been under fire for security risks associated with JavaScript security exploits and privacy abuse by large data tracking companies.

Because of these reasons, web users will sometimes turn off their cookies, rendering normal ASP session implementations powerless, resulting in a new $Session generated every request. This is not good for ASP style sessions.

Cookieless Sessions

*** See WARNING Below ***

So we now have more ways to track sessions with the SessionQuery* CONFIG settings, that allow a web developer to embed the session id in URL query strings when use of cookies is denied. The implementations work such that if a user has cookies turned on, then cookies will be used, but for those users with cookies turned off, the session ids will be parsed into document URLs.

The first and easiest method that a web developer may use to implement cookieless sessions are with SessionQueryParse* directives which enable Apache::ASP to the parse the session id into document URLs on the fly. Because this is resource inefficient, there is also the SessionQuery* directives that may be used with the $Server->URL($url,\%params) method to generate custom URLs with the session id in its query string.

To see an example of these cookieless sessions in action, check out the ./site/eg/cookieless_session.asp example.

*** WARNING ***

If you do use these methods, then be VERY CAREFUL of linking offsite from a page that was accessed with a session id in a query string. This is because this session id will show up in the HTTP_REFERER logs of the linked to site, and a malicious hacker could use this information to compromise the security of your site's $Sessions, even if these are run under a secure web server.

In order to shake a session id off an HTTP_REFERER for a link taking a user offsite, you must point that link to a redirect page that will redirect a user, like so:

 <% 
    # "cross site scripting bug" prevention
    my $sanitized_url = 
	$Server->HTMLEncode($Response->QueryString('OffSiteUrl'));
 %>
 <html>
 <head>
 <meta http-equiv=refresh content='0;URL=<%=$sanitized_url%>'>
 </head>
 <body>	
	Redirecting you offsite to 
	<a href=<%=$sanitized_url%> >here</a>...
 </body>
 </html>

Because the web browser visits a real page before being redirected with the <meta> tag, the HTTP_REFERER will be set to this page. Just be sure to not link to this page with a session id in its query string.

Unfortunately a simple $Response->Redirect() will not work here, because the web browser will keep the HTTP_REFERER of the original web page if only a normal redirect is used.

FAQ

The following are some frequently asked questions about Apache::ASP.

Installation

Apache errors on the PerlHandler directive ?

You do not have mod_perl correctly installed for Apache. The PerlHandler directive in Apache *.conf files is an extension enabled by mod_perl and will not work if mod_perl is not correctly installed.

Common user errors are not doing a 'make install' for mod_perl, which installs the perl side of mod_perl, and not starting the right httpd after building it. The latter often occurs when you have an old apache server without mod_perl, and you have built a new one without copying over to its proper location.

To get mod_perl, go to http://perl.apache.org

Error: no request object (Apache=SCALAR(0x???????):)

Your Apache + mod_perl build is not working properly, and is likely a RedHat Linux RPM DSO build. Make sure you statically build your Apache + mod_perl httpd, recompiled fresh from the sources.

I am getting a tie or MLDBM / state error message, what do I do?

Make sure the web server or you have write access to the eg directory, or to the directory specified as Global in the config you are using. Default for Global is the directory the script is in (e.g. '.'), but should be set to some directory not under the www server document root, for security reasons, on a production site.

Usually a

chmod -R -0777 eg

will take care of the write access issue for initial testing purposes.

Failing write access being the problem, try upgrading your version of Data::Dumper and MLDBM, which are the modules used to write the state files.

Sessions

How can I use $Session to store complex data structures.

Very carefully. Please read the $Session documentation in the OBJECTS section. You can store very complex objects in $Session, but you have to understand the limits, and the syntax that must be used to make this happen.

In particular, stay away from statements that that have more than one level of indirection on the left side of an assignment like:

$Session->{complex}{object} = $data;

Insecure dependency in eval while running with - T switch ?

If you are running your mod_perl with "PerlTaintCheck On", which is recommended if you are highly concerned about security issues, you may get errors like "Insecure dependency ... with - T switch".

Apache::ASP automatically untaints data internally so that you may run scripts with PerlTaintCheck On, but if you are using state objects like $Session or $Application, you must also notify MLDBM, which Apache::ASP uses internally, to also untaint data read from disk, with this setting:

$MLDBM::RemoveTaint = 1;

You could put the above line in your global.asa, which is just like a perl module, outside any event handlers you define there.

How can I use $Session to store a $dbh database handle ?

You cannot use $Session to store a $dbh handle. This can be awkward for those coming from the IIS/NT world, where you could store just about anything in $Session, but this boils down to a difference between threads vs. processes.

Database handles often have per process file handles open, which cannot be shared between requests, so though you have stored the $dbh data in $Session, all the other initializations are not relevant in another httpd process.

All is not lost! Apache::DBI can be used to cache database connections on a per process basis, and will work for most cases.

Development

How is database connectivity handled?

Database connectivity is handled through perl's DBI & DBD interfaces. Please see http://www.symbolstone.org/technology/perl/DBI/ for more information. In the UNIX world, it seems most databases have cross platform support in perl.

DBD::ODBC is often your ticket on Win32. On UNIX, commercial vendors like OpenLink Software (http://www.openlinksw.com/) provide the nuts and bolts for ODBC.

Database connections can be cached per process with Apache::DBI.

What is the best way to debug an ASP application ?

There are lots of perl-ish tricks to make your life developing and debugging an ASP application easier. For starters, you will find some helpful hints by reading the $Response->Debug() API extension, and the Debug configuration directive.

How are file uploads handled?

Please see the CGI section. File uploads are implemented through CGI.pm which is loaded at runtime only for this purpose. This is the only time that CGI.pm will be loaded by Apache::ASP, which implements all other cgi-ish functionality natively. The rationale for not implementing file uploads natively is that the extra 100K in memory for CGI.pm shouldn't be a big deal if you are working with bulky file uploads.

How do I access the ASP Objects in general?

All the ASP objects can be referenced through the main package with the following notation:

$main::Response->Write("html output");

This notation can be used from anywhere in perl, including routines registered with $Server->RegisterCleanup().

You use the normal notation in your scripts, includes, and global.asa:

$Response->Write("html output");

Can I print() in ASP?

Yes. You can print() from anywhere in an ASP script as it aliases to the $Response->Write() method. Using print() is portable with PerlScript when using Win32::ASP in that environment.

Do I have access to ActiveX objects?

Only under Win32 will developers have access to ActiveX objects through the perl Win32::OLE interface. This will remain true until there are free COM ports to the UNIX world. At this time, there is no ActiveX for the UNIX world.

Can I script in VBScript or JScript ?

Yes, but not with this perl module. For ASP with other scripting languages besides perl, you will need to go with a commercial vendor in the UNIX world. ChiliSoft at http://www.chilisoft.com/ has one such solution. Of course on NT, you get this for free with IIS.

Support and Production

How do I get things I want done?!

If you find a problem with the module, or would like a feature added, please mail support, as listed in the SUPPORT section, and your needs will be promptly and seriously considered, then implemented.

What is the state of Apache::ASP? Can I publish a web site on it?

Apache::ASP has been production ready since v.02. Work being done on the module is on a per need basis, with the goal being to eventually have the ASP API completed, with full portability to ActiveState PerlScript and MKS PScript. If you can suggest any changes to facilitate these goals, your comments are welcome.

TUNING

A little tuning can go a long way, and can make the difference between a web site that gets by, and a site that screams with speed. With Apache::ASP, you can easily take a poorly tuned site running at 5 hits/second to 25+ hits/second just with the right configuration.

Documented below are some simple things you can do to make the most of your site.

For more tips & tricks on tuning Apache and mod_perl, please see the tuning documents at:

Stas Bekman's mod_perl guide
http://perl.apache.org/guide/

Vivek Khera's mod_perl performance tuning
http://perl.apache.org/tuning/ 

$Application & $Session State

Use NoState 1 setting if you don't need the $Application or $Session objects. State objects such as these tie to files on disk and will incur a performance penalty.

If you need the state objects $Application and $Session, and if running an OS that caches files in memory, set your "StateDir" directory to a cached file system. On WinNT, all files may be cached, and you have no control of this. On Solaris, /tmp is cached and would be a good place to set the "StateDir" config setting to. When cached file systems are used there is little performance penalty for using state files.

High MaxRequests

Set your max requests per child thread or process (in httpd.conf) high, so that ASP scripts have a better chance being cached, which happens after they are first compiled. You will also avoid the process fork penalty on UNIX systems. Somewhere between 100 - 1000 is probably pretty good.

Precompile Scripts

Precompile your scripts by using the Apache::ASP->Loader() routine documented below. This will at least save the first user hitting a script from suffering compile time lag. On UNIX, precompiling scripts upon server startup allows this code to be shared with forked child www servers, so you reduce overall memory usage, and use less CPU compiling scripts for each separate www server process. These savings could be significant. On my PII300, it takes a couple seconds to compile 28 scripts upon server startup, with an average of 50K RAM per compiled script, and this savings is passed on to the child httpd servers.

Apache::ASP->Loader() can be called to precompile scripts and even entire ASP applications at server startup. Note also that in modperl, you can precompile modules with the PerlModule config directive, which is highly recommended.

Apache::ASP->Loader($path, $pattern, %config)

This routine takes a file or directory as its first arg. If a file, that file will be compiled. If a directory, that directory will be recursed, and all files in it whose file name matches $pattern will be compiled. $pattern defaults to .*, which says that all scripts in a directory will be compiled by default.

The %config args, are the config options that you want set that affect compilation. These options include Debug, Global, GlobalPackage, DynamicIncludes, StatINC, and StatINCMatch. If your scripts are later run with different config options, your scripts may have to be recompiled.

Here is an example of use in a *.conf file:

 <Perl> 
 Apache::ASP->Loader(
	'c:/proj/site', "(asp|htm)\$", 
	Global => '/proj/perllib',
	Debug => 1, # see output when starting apache

	# OPTIONAL configs if you use them in your apache configuration
	# these settings affect how the scripts are compiled and loaded
	GlobalPackage => SomePackageName,
	DynamicIncludes => 1,	
	StatINC => 1,		
	); 
 </Perl>

This config section tells the server to compile all scripts in c:/proj/site that end in asp or htm, and print debugging output so you can see it work. It also sets the Global directory to be /proj/perllib, which needs to be the same as your real config since scripts are cached uniquely by their Global directory. You will probably want to use this on a production server, unless you cannot afford the extra startup time.

To see precompiling in action, set Debug to 1 for the Loader() and for your application in general and watch your error_log for messages indicating scripts being cached.

No .htaccess or StatINC

Don't use .htaccess files or the StatINC setting in a production system as there are many more files touched per request using these features. I've seen performance slow down by half because of using these. For eliminating the .htaccess file, move settings into *.conf Apache files.

Instead of StatINC, try using the StatINCMatch config, which will check a small subset of perl libraries for changes. This config is fine for a production environment, and if used well might only incur a 10-20% performance penalty.

Turn off Debugging

Turn debugging off by setting Debug to 0. Having the debug config option on slows things down immensely.

RAM Sparing

If you have a lot of scripts, and limited memory, set NoCache to 1, so that compiled scripts are not cached in memory. You lose about 10-15% in speed for small scripts, but save at least 10K per cached script. These numbers are very rough. If you use includes, you can instead try setting DynamicIncludes to 1, which will share compiled code for includes between scripts.

SEE ALSO

perl(1), mod_perl(3), Apache(3), MLDBM(3), HTTP::Date(3), CGI(3), Win32::OLE(3)

KEYWORDS

Apache,ASP,perl,apache,mod_perl,asp,Active Server Pages,perl,asp,web application,ASP, session management,Active Server,scripting,dynamic html,asp,perlscript,Unix,Linux,Solaris,Win32,WinNT, cgi compatible,asp,response,ASP,request,session,application,server,Active Server Pages

NOTES

Many thanks to those who helped me make this module a reality. ASP + Apache, web development could not be better! Kudos go out to:

:) Doug MacEachern, for moral support and of course mod_perl
:) Ryan Whelan, for boldly testing on Unix in the early infancy of ASP
:) Lupe Christoph, for his immaculate and stubborn testing skills
:) Bryan Murphy, for being a PerlScript wiz
:) Francesco Pasqualini, for bringing ASP to CGI
:) Michael Rothwell, for his love of Session hacking
:) Lincoln Stein, for his blessed CGI.pm module
:) Alan Sparks, for knowing when size is more important than speed
:) Jeff Groves, who put a STOP to user stop button woes
:) Matt Sergeant, for his great tutorial on PerlScript and love of ASP
:) Ken Williams, for great teamwork bringing full SSI to the table
:) Darren Gibbons, the biggest cookie-monster I have ever known.
:) Doug Silver, for finding most of the bugs.
:) Marc Spencer, who brainstormed dynamic includes.
:) Greg Stark, for endless enthusiasm, pushing the module to its limits.
:) Richard Rossi, for his need for speed & boldly testing dynamic includes.
:) Bill McKinnon, who understands the finer points of running a web site.
:) Russell Weiss, for being every so "strict" about his code.
:) Paul Linder, who is Mr. Clean... not just the code, its faster too !
:) Tony Merc Mobily, inspiring tweaks to compile scripts 10 times faster
:) Russell Weiss again, for finding the internal session garbage collection 
   behaving badly with DB_File sensitive i/o flushing requirements.
:) Dmitry Beransky, for sharable web application includes, ASP on the big.
:) Adi, who thought to have full admin control over sessions
:) Matt Arnold, for the excellent graphics !
:) Remi Fasol + Serge Sozonoff who inspired cookieless sessions.
:) Matt Sergeant, again, for ever the excellent XML critique.
:) Stas Bekman, for his beloved guide, and keeping us all worldly.
:) Gerald Richter, for his Embperl, collaboration and competition!

SUPPORT

MAILING LIST ARCHIVE

The mod_perl mailing list archives are located at:

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/modperl
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/web/182/0/
http://www.bitmechanic.com/mail-archives/modperl/
http://www.egroups.com/group/modperl/

and allow searching for previously asked Apache::ASP and mod_perl questions. Often times what may seem to be an Apache::ASP issue is really a mod_perl issue.

EMAIL

Please send any questions or comments to the Apache mod_perl mailing list at modperl@apache.org with at least Apache::ASP in the subject line. Note that answers to these questions will be archived at the above mailing archives, and you may be able to find your answer there.

COMMERCIAL

We are considering a commercial support offering for Apache::ASP, with varying levels of service, ranging from 24x7 incident support packages, high priority module development, web application tuning and basic guaranteed email support.

If you are interested in any of the above commercial support offerings, please email asp@chamas.com and we will pursue an official support channel if there is enough interest. Please note that this would likely be modeled on the MySQL support features and pricing.

SITES USING

What follows is a list of public sites that are using Apache::ASP. If you use the software for your site, and would like to show your support of the software by being listed, please send your URL to me at joshua@chamas.com and I'll be sure to add it to the list.

Chamas Enterprises Inc.		
http://www.chamas.com

HCST
http://www.hcst.net

International Telecommunication Union
http://www.itu.int

Internetowa Gielda Samochodowa		
http://www.gielda.szczecin.pl

Multiple Listing Service of Greater Cincinnati
http://www.cincymls.com

NodeWorks - web link monitoring				
http://www.nodeworks.com

OnTheWeb Services
http://www.ontheweb.nu

Provillage
http://www.provillage.com

Prices for Antiques
http://www.p4a.com

redhat.com | support
http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/

Sex Shop Online				
http://www.sex.shop.pl

Spotlight
http://www.spotlight.com.au

USCD Electrical & Computer Engineering
http://ece-local.ucsd.edu

Wild Technologies Limited
http://wild.com.hk

TODO

There is no specific time frame in which these things will be implemented. Please let me know if any of these is of particular interest to you, and I will give it higher priority.

WILL BE DONE

+ Better debugging, line numbers for dynamic includes.  
  Maybe also some lightweight syntax error checking.
+ MailErrorsPower, sends duplicate errors every 1,10,100... occurances
+ MailErrorsPowerPeriod, resets the duplicate errors counter.
+ XML extensions allowing full rendering of XML documents, and 
  custom tag extensions for a site.
+ Database storage of $Session & $Application, so web clusters may be used
  to serve up Apache::ASP content, maybe via Apache::Session.
+ Dumping state of Apache::ASP during an error, and being
  able to go through it with the perl debugger.
+ Investigating possibility of hooking $Session timeout into 
  client/server 401 authentication failure.  Seems like IE 
  caches passwords which makes things tough
+ $Request->ClientCertificate()
+ asp.pl, CGI method of doing asp

MAY BE DONE

+ VBScript, ECMAScript interpreters
+ allow use of Apache::Session for session management
+ Close integration with HTML::Embperl
+ BerkeleyDB2 integration for state management, maybe getting
  shared memory to work.

CHANGES

+ = improvement; - = bug fix

$VERSION = .18; $DATE="02/03/00";

+Documented SessionQuery* & $Server->URL() and 
 cleaned up formatting some, as well as redoing
 some of the sections ordering for better readability.
 Document the cookieless session functionality more
 in a new COOKIES section.  Also documented new 
 FileUpload configs and $Request->FileUpload collection.
 Documented StatScripts.

+StatScripts setting which if set to 0 will not reload
 includes, global.asa, or scripts when changed.

+FileUpload filehandles cleanup at garbage collection
 time so developer does not have to worry about lazy coding
 and undeffing filehandles used in code.  Also set 
 uploaded filehandles to binmode automatically on Win32 
 platforms, saving the developer yet more typing.

+FileUploadTemp setting, default 0, if set will leave
 a temp file on disk during the request, which may be 
 helpful for processing by other programs, but is also
 a security risk in that others could potentially read 
 this file while the script is running. 

 The path to the temp file will be available at
 $Request->{FileUpload}{$form_field}{TempFile}.
 The regular use of file uploads remains the same
 with the <$filehandle> to the upload at 
 $Request->{Form}{$form_field}.

+FileUploadMax setting, default 0, currently an 
 alias for $CGI::POST_MAX, which determines the 
 max size for a file upload in bytes.  

+SessionQueryParse only auto parses session-ids
 into links when a session-id COOKIE is NOT found.
 This feature is only enabled then when a user has
 disabled cookies, so the runtime penalty of this
 feature won't drag down the whole site, since most
 users will have cookies turned on.   

-StatINC & StatINCMatch will not undef Fnctl.pm flock 
 functions constants like O_RDWR, because the code references
 are not well trackable.  This would result in sporadic 500 server
 errors when a changed module was reloaded that imported O_* flock 
 functions from Fnctl.

+SessionQueryParse & SessionQueryParseMatch
 settings that enable auto parsing session ids into 
 URLs for cookieless sessions.  Will pick up URLs in 
 <a href>, <area href>, <form action>, <frame src>,
 <iframe src>, <img src>, <input src>, <link href>
 $Response->Redirect($URL) and the first URL in 
 script tags like <script>*.location.href=$URL</script>

 These settings require that buffering be enabled, as
 Apache::ASP will parse through the buffer to parse the URLs.

 With SessionQueryParse on, it will just parse non-absolute
 URLs, but with SessionQueryParseMatch set to some server
 url regexp, like http://www.mysite.com, will also parse
 in the session id for URLs that match that.

 When testing, the performance hit from this parsing
 a script dropped from 12.5 hits/sec on my WinNT box
 to 11.7 hits per second for 1K of buffered output.
 The difference is .007 of my PII300's processing power
 per second.

 For 10K of output then, my guess is that this speed
 of script, would be slowed to 6.8 hits per second.
 This kind of performance hit would also slow a
 script running at 40 hits per second on a UNIX box
 to 31 hits/sec for 1K, and to 11 hits/sec for 10K parsed.

 Your mileage may vary and you will have to test the difference
 yourself.  Get yourself a valid URL with a session-id in
 it, and run it through ab, or socrates, with SessionQuery
 turned on, and then with SessionQueryParse set to see 
 the difference.  SessionQuery just enables of session id
 setting from the query string but will not auto parse urls.

-If buffering, Content-Length will again be set.
 It broke, probably while I was tuning in the past 
 couple versions.

+UseStrict setting compiles all scripts including
 global.asa with "use strict" turned on for catching
 more coding errors.  With this setting enableb,
 use strict errors die during compilation forcing
 Apache::ASP to try to recompile the script until
 successful.

-Object use in includes like $Response->Write() 
 no longer error with "use strict" programming.  

+SessionQuery config setting with $Server->URL($url, { %params } ) 
 alpha API extensions to enable cookieless sessions.

+Debugging not longer produces internal debugging
 by default.  Set to -1,-2 for internal debugging
 for Debug settings 1 & 2.

+Both StateSerializer & StateDB can be changed 
 without affecting a live web site, by storing 
 the configurations for $Application & $Session 
 in an internal database, so that if $Session was
 created with SDBM_File for the StateDB (default),
 it will keep this StateDB setting until it ends.

+StateSerializer config setting.  Default Data::Dumper,
 can also be set to Storable.  Controls how data is
 serialized before writing to $Application & $Session.

+Beefed up the make test suite.

+Improved the locking, streamlining a bit of the 
 $Application / $Session setup process.  Bench is up to 
 22 from 21 hits / sec on dev NT box.

+Cut more fat for faster startup, now on my dev box 
 I get 44 hits per sec Apache::ASP vs 48 Embperl 
 vs 52 CGI via Apache::Registry for the HelloWorld Scripts.

-Improved linking for the online site documentation, 
 where a few links before were bad.

$VERSION = .17; $DATE="11/15/99";

 ++20%+ faster startup script execution, as measured by the 
  HelloWorld bench.  I cut a lot of the fat out of 
  the code, and is now at least 20% faster on startup 
  both with and without state.

  On my dev (NT,apache 1.3.6+mod_perl) machine, I now get:

	42 hits per sec on Apache::ASP HelloWorld bench
	46 hits per sec on Embperl (1.2b10) and
	51 hits per sec for CGI Apache::Registry scripts  

  Before Apache::ASP was clocking some 31 hits per sec.
  Apache::ASP also went from 75 to 102 hits per second 
  on Solaris.

 +PerlTaintCheck On friendly.  This is mod_perl's way 
  of providing -T taint checking.  When Apache::ASP
  is used with state objects like $Session or $Application,
  MLDBM must also be made taint friendly with:

    $MLDBM::RemoveTaint = 1;

  which could be put in the global.asa.  Documented.

 +Added $Response->ErrorDocument($error_code, $uri_or_string) 
  API extension which allows for setting of Apache's error
  document at runtime.  This is really just a wrapper 
  for Apache->custom_response() renamed so it syncs with
  the Apache ErrorDocument config setting.  Updated
  documentation, and added error_document.htm example.

 =OrderCollections setting was added, but then REMOVED
  because it was not going to be used.  It bound 
  $Request->* collections/hashes to Tie::IxHash, so that data
  in those collections would be read in the order the 
  browser sent it, when eaching through or with keys.

 -global.asa will be reloaded when changed.  This broke
  when I optimized the modification times with (stat($file))[9]
  rather than "use File::stat; stat($file)->mtime"

 -Make Apache::ASP->Loader() PerlRestartHandler safe,
  had some unstrict code that was doing the wrong thing.

 -IncludesDir config now works with DynamicIncludes.

 +DebugBufferLength feature added, giving control to 
  how much buffered output get's shown when debugging errors.

 ++Tuning of $Response->Write(), which processes all
  static html internally, to be almost 50% faster for
  its typical use, when BufferingOn is enabled, and 
  CgiHeaders are disabled, both being defaults.

  This can show significant speed improvements for tight
  loops that render ASP output.

 +Auto linking of ./site/eg/.* text to example scripts
  at web site.

 +$Application->GetSession($session_id) API extension, useful
  for managing active user sessions when storing session ids
  in $Application.  Documented.

 -disable use of flock() on Win95/98 where it is unimplemented

 -@array context of $Request->Form('name') returns
  undef when value for 'name' is undefined.  Put extra
  logic in there to make sure this happens. 

$VERSION = .16; $DATE="09/22/99";

-$Response->{Buffer} and PerlSetVar BufferingOn
 configs now work when set to 0, to unbuffer output,
 and send it out to the web client as the script generates it.

 Buffering is enabled by default, as it is faster, and
 allows a script to error cleanly in the middle of execution.  

+more bullet proof loading of Apache::Symbol, changed the 
 way Apache::ASP loads modules in general.  It used to 
 check for the module to load every time, if it hadn't loaded
 successfully before, but now it just tries once per httpd,
 so the web server will have to be restarted to see new installed
 modules.  This is just for modules that Apache::ASP relies on.

 Old modules that are changed or updated with an installation
 are still reloaded with the StatINC settings if so configured. 

+ASP web site wraps <font face="courier new"> around <pre>
 tags now to override the other font used for the text
 areas.  The spacing was all weird in Netscape before
 for <pre> sections.

-Fixed Content-Length calculation when using the Clean
 option, so that the length is calculated after the HTML
 is clean, not before.  This would cause a browser to 
 hang sometimes.

+Added IncludesDir config option that if set will also be
 used to check for includes, so that includes may easily be
 shared between applications.  By default only Global and 
 the directory the script is in are checked for includes.

 Also added IncludesDir as a possible configuration option
 for Apache::ASP->Loader()

-Re-enabled the Application_OnStart & OnEnd events, after
 breaking them when implementing the AllowApplicationState
 config setting.

+Better pre-fork cacheing ... StatINC & StatINCMatch are now 
 args for Apache::ASP->Loader(), so StatINC symbols loading
 may be done pre-fork and shared between httpds.  This lowers
 the child httpd init cost of StatINC.  Documented.

+Made Apache::ASP Basic Authorization friendly so authentication
 can be handled by ASP scripts.  If AuthName and AuthType Apache
 config directives are set, and a $Response->{Status} is set to 
 401, a user will be prompted for username/password authentication
 and the entered data will show up in ServerVariables as:
   $env = $Request->ServerVariables
   $env->{REMOTE_USER} = $env->{AUTH_USER} = username
   $env->{AUTH_PASSWD} = password
   $env->{AUTH_NAME}   = your realm
   $env->{AUTH_TYPE}   = 'Basic'

 This is the same place to find auth data as if Apache had some 
 authentication handler deal with the auth phase separately.

-MailErrorsTo should report the right file now that generates
 the error.

$VERSION = .15; $DATE="08/24/99";

 --State databases like $Session, $Application are 
  now tied/untied to every lock/unlock triggered by read/write 
  access.  This was necessary for correctness issues, so that 
  database file handles are flushed appropriately between writes
  in a highly concurrent multi-process environment.

  This problem raised its ugly head because under high volume, 
  a DB_File can become corrupt if not flushed correctly.  
  Unfortunately, there is no way to flush SDBM_Files & DB_Files 
  consistently other than to tie/untie the databases every access.

  DB_File may be used optionally for StateDB, but the default is
  to use SDBM_File which is much faster, but limited to 1024 byte
  key/value pairs.

  For SDBM_Files before, if there were too many concurrent 
  writes to a shared database like $Application, some of the 
  writes would not be saved because another process
  might overwrite the changes with its own.

  There is now a 10 fold performance DECREASE associated
  with reading from and writing to files like $Session 
  and $Application.  With rough benchmarks I can get about
  100 increments (++) now per second to $Session->{count}, where
  before I could get 1000 increments / second.  

  You can improve this if you have many reads / writes happening
  at the same time, by placing locking code around the group like
  
	$Session->Lock();
	$Session->{count}++;
	$Session->{count}++;
	$Session->{count}++;
	$Session->UnLock();	

  This method will reduce the number of ties to the $Session database
  from 6 to 1 for this kind of code, and will improve the performance
  dramatically.

  Also, instead of using explicit $Session locking, you can 
  create an automatic lock on $Session per script by setting
  SessionSerialize in your config to 1.  The danger here is
  if you have any long running scripts, the user will have
  to wait for it to finish before another script can be run.

  To see the number of lock/unlocks or ties/unties to each database
  during a script execution, look at the last lines of debug output
  to your error log when Debug is set to 1.  This can help you
  perfomance tweak access to these databases.

 +Updated documentation with new config settings and
  API extensions.

 +Added AllowApplicationState config option which allows
  you to leave $Application undefined, and will not
  execute Application_OnStart or Application_OnEnd.
  This can be a slight performance increase of 2-3% if
  you are not using $Application, but are using $Session.

 +Added $Session->Lock() / $Session->UnLock() API routines
  necessary additions since access to session is not
  serialized by default like IIS ASP.  Also prompted
  by change in locking code which retied to SDBM_File
  or DB_File each lock.  If you $Session->Lock / UnLock
  around many read/writes, you will increase performance.

 +Added StateCache config which, if set will cache
  the file handle locks for $Application and an internal 
  database used for tracking $Session info.  This caching can 
  make an ASP application perform up to 10% faster,
  at a cost of each web server process holding 2 more 
  cached file handles open, per ASP application using
  this configuration.  The data written to or read from
  these state databases is not cached, just the locking 
  file handles are held open.

 -Added in much more locking in session manager 
  and session garbage collector to help avoid collisions
  between the two.  There were definate windows that the
  two would collide in, during which bad things could 
  happen on a high volume site.

 -Fixed some warnings in DESTROY and ParseParams()

$VERSION = .14; $DATE="07/29/99";

-CGI & StatINC or StatINCMatch would have bad results
 at times, with StatINC deleting dynamically compiled
 CGI subroutines, that were imported into other scripts
 and modules namespaces.

 A couple tweaks, and now StatINC & CGI play nice again ;)
 StatINCMatch should be safe to use in production with CGI. 
 This affects in particular environments that use file upload, 
 since CGI is loaded automatically by Apache::ASP to handle 
 file uploads.

 This fix should also affect other seemingly random 
 times when StatINC or StatINCMatch don't seem to do 
 the right thing.

+use of ASP objects like $Response are now "use strict"
 safe in scripts, while UniquePackages config is set.

+Better handling of "use strict" errors in ASP scripts.
 The error is detected, and the developer is pointed to the 
 Apache error log for the exact error.  

 The script with "use strict" errors will be recompiled again.  Its seems 
 though that "use strict" will only throw its error once, so that a script 
 can be recompiled with the same errors, and work w/o any use strict
 error messaging.  

$VERSION = .12; $DATE="07/01/99";

-Compiles are now 10 +times faster for scripts with lots of big
 embedded perl blocks <% #perl %>

 Compiles were slow because of an old PerlScript compatibility
 parsing trick where $Request->QueryString('hi')->{item}
 would be parsed to $Request->QueryString('hi') which works.
 I think the regexp that I was using had O(n^2) characteristics
 and it took a really big perl block to 10 +seconds to parse
 to understand there was a problem :(

 I doubt anyone needed this compatibility, I don't even see
 any code that looks like this in the online PerlScript examples,
 so I've commented out this parsing trick for now.  If you 
 need me to bring back this functionality, it will be in the 
 form of a config setting.

 For information on PerlScript compatibility, see the PerlScript
 section in the ASP docs.

-Added UniquePackages config option, that if set brings back 
 the old method of compiling each ASP script into its own
 separate package.  As of v.10, scripts are compiled by default
 into the same package, so that scripts, dynamic includes & global.asa
 can share globals.  This BROKE scripts in the same ASP Application
 that defined the same sub routines, as their subs would redefine
 each other.  

 UniquePackages has scripts compiled into separate perl packages,
 so they may define subs with the same name, w/o fear of overlap.
 Under this settings, scripts will not be able to share globals.  

-Secure field for cookies in $Response->Cookies() must be TRUE to 
 force cookie to be secure.  Before, it just had to be defined, 
 which gave wrong behavior for Secure => 0. 

+$Response->{IsClientConnected} set to one by default.  Will
 work out a real value when I upgrade to apache 1.3.6.  This
 value has no meaning before, as apache aborts the perl code
 when a client drops its connection in earlier versions.

+better compile time debugging of dynamic includes, with 
 Debug 2 setting

+"use strict" friendly handling of compiling dynamic includes
 with errors

$VERSION = .11; $DATE="06/24/99";

+Lots of documentation updates

+The MailHost config option is the smtp server used for 
 relay emails for the Mail* config options.

+MailAlertTo config option used for sending a short administrative
 alert for an internal ASP error, server code 500.  This is the 
 compliment to MailErrorsTo, but is suited for sending a to a
 small text based pager.  The email sent by MailErrorsTo would
 then be checked by the web admin for quick response & debugging
 for the incident. 

 The MailAlertPeriod config specifies the time in minutes during 
 which only one alert will be sent, which defaults to 20.

+MailErrorsTo config options sends the results of a 500 error
 to the email address specified as if Debug were set to 2.
 If Debug 2 is set, this config will not be on, as it is
 for production use only.  Debug settings less than 2 only 
 log errors to the apache server error log.

-StatINCMatch / StatINC can be used in production and work
 even after a server graceful restart, which is essential for 
 a production server.

-Content-Length header is set again, if BufferingOn is set, and
 haven't $Response->Flush()'d.  This broke when I introduce
 the Script_OnEnd event handler.

+Optimized reloading of the GlobalPackage perl module upon changes, 
 so that scripts and dynamic includes don't have to be recompiled.  
 The global.asa will still have to be though.  Since we started
 compiling all routines into a package that can be named with
 GlobalPackage, we've been undef'ing compiled scripts and includes
 when the real GlobalPackage changed on disk, as we do a full sweep
 through the namespace.  Now, we skip those subs that we know to 
 be includes or scripts. 

-Using Apache::Symbol::undef() to undefine precompiled scripts
 and includes when reloading those scripts.  Doing just an undef() 
 would sometimes result in an "active subroutine undef" error.
 This bug came out when I started thrashing the StatINC system
 for production use.

+StatINCMatch setting created for production use reloading of
 perl modules.  StatINCMatch allows StatINC reloading of a
 subset of all the modules defined in %INC, those that match
 $module =~ /$StatINCMatch/, where module is some module name
 like Class/Struct.pm

+Reoptimized pod comment parsing.  I slowed it down to sync
 lines numbers in the last version, but found another corner I could cut.

$VERSION = .10; $DATE="05/24/99";

+= improvement; - = bug fix

+Added index.html file to ./eg to help people wade through
 the examples.  This one has been long overdue.

+Clean config option, or setting $Response->{Clean} to 1 - 9,
 uses HTML::Clean to compress text/html output of ASP scripts.
 I like the Clean 1 setting which is lightweight, stripping 
 whitespace for about 10% compression, at a cost of less than
 a 5% performance penalty.

+Using pod style commenting no longer confuses the line
 numbering.  ASP script line numbers are almost exactly match
 their compiled perl version, except that normal inline includes
 (not dynamic) insert extra text which can confuse line numbering.
 If you want perl error line numbers to entirely sync with your 
 ASP scripts, I would suggest learning how to use dynamic includes,
 as opposed to inline includes.

-Wrapped StatINC reloading of libs in an eval, and capturing
 error for Debug 2 setting.  This makes changing libs with StatINC
 on a little more friendly when there are errors. 

-$Request->QueryString() now stores multiple values for the 
 same key, just as $Request->Form() has since v.07.  In
 wantarray() context like @vals = $Request->QueryString('dupkey'),
 @vals will store whatever values where associated with dupkey
 in the query string like (1,2) from: ?dupkey=1&dupkey=2

+The GlobalPackage config directive may be defined
 to explicitly set the perl module that all scripts and global.asa
 are compiled into.

-Dynamic includes may be in the Global directory, just like
 normal includes.

+Perl script generated from asp scripts should match line
 for line, seen in errors, except when using inline (default) 
 includes, pod comments, or <% #comment %> perl comments, which 
 will throw off the line counts by adding text, removing
 text, or having an extra newline added, respectively.

-Script_OnEnd may now send output to the browser.  Before
 $main::Response->End() was being called at the end of the
 main script preventing further output.

++All scripts are compiled as routines in a namespace uniquely defined by the global.asa of the ASP application. Thus, scripts, includes, and global.asa routines will share all globals defined in the global.asa namespace. This means that globals between scripts will be shared, and globals defined in a global.asa will be available to scripts.

 Scripts used to have their own namespace, thus globals
 were not shared between them.

+a -o $output_dir switch on the ./cgi/asp script allows
 it to execute scripts and write their output to an output
 directory.  Useful for building static html sites, based on
 asp scripts.  An example use would be:

   asp -b -o out *.asp

 Without an output dir, script output is written to STDOUT

$VERSION = .09; $DATE="04/22/99";

+Updated Makefile.PL optional modules output for CGI & DB_File

+Improved docs on $Response->Cookies() and $Request->Cookies()

+Added PERFORMANCE doc to main README, and added sub section
 on precompiling scripts with Apache::ASP->Loader()

+Naming of CompileIncludes switched over to DynamicIncludes 
 for greater clarity.

+Dynamic includes can now reference ASP objects like $Session
 w/o the $main::* syntax.  These subs are no longer anonymous
 subs, and are now compiled into the namespace of the global.asa package.

+Apache::ASP->Loader() precompiles dynamic includes too. Making this work
 required fixing some subtle bugs / dependencies in the compiling process.

+Added Apache::ASP->Loader() similar to Apache::RegistryLoader for
 precompiling ASP scripts.  Precompile a whole site at server 
 startup with one function call.

+Prettied the error messaging with Debug 2.

+$Response->Debug(@args) debugging extension, which
 allows a developer to hook into the module's debugging,
 and only have @args be written to error_log when Debug is greater
 than 0.

-Put write locking code around State writes, like $Session
 and $Application.  I thought I fixed this bug a while ago.

-API change: converted $Session->Timeout() and $Session->SessionID() 
 methods into $Session->{Timeout} and $Session->{SessionID} properties.
 The use of these properties as methods is deprecated, but 
 backwards compatibility will remain.  Updated ./eg/session.asp
 to use these new properties.

+Implemented $Response->{PICS} which if set sends out a PICS-Label
 HTTP header, useful for ratings.

+Implemented $Response->{CacheControl} and $Response->{Charset} members.
 By default, CacheControl is 'private', and this value gets sent out
 every request as HTTP header Cache-Control.  Charset appends itself
 onto the content type header.

+Implemented $Request->BinaryRead(), $Request->{TotalBytes},
 documented them, and updated ./eg/form.asp for an example usage. 

+Implemented $Response->BinaryWrite(), documented, and created
 and example in ./eg/binary_write.htm

+Implemented $Server->MapPath() and created example of its use
 in ./eg/server.htm

-$Request->Form() now reads file uploads correctly with 
 the latest CGI.pm, where $Request->Form('file_field') returns
 the actual file name uploaded, which can be used as a file handle
 to read in the data.  Before, $Request->Form('file_field') would
 return a glob that looks like *Fh::filename, so to get the file
 name, you would have to parse it like =~ s/^\*Fh\:\://,
 which you no longer have to do.  As long as parsing was done as
 mentioned, the change should be backwards compatible.

+Updated  +enhanced documentation on file uploads.  Created extra
 comments about it as an FAQ, and under $Response->Form(), the latter
 being an obvious place for a developer to look for it.

+Updated ./eg/file_upload.asp to show use of non file form data, 
 with which we had a bug before.

+Finished retieing *STDIN to cached STDIN contents, so that 
 CGI input routines may be used transparently, along side with
 use of $Request->Form()

+Cleaned up and optimized $Request code

+Updated documentation for CGI input & file uploads.  Created
 file upload FAQ.

+Reworked ./eg/cgi.htm example to use CGI input routines
 after doing a native read of STDIN.

++Added dynamic includes with <!--include file=file args=@args-->
 extension.  This style of include is compiled as an anonymous sub & 
 cached, and then executed with @args passed to the subroutine for 
 execution.  This is include may also be rewritten as a new API 
 extension: $Response->Include('file', @args)

+Added ./eg/compiled_includes.htm example documenting new dynamic includes.

+Documented SSI: native file includes, and the rest with filtering 
 to Apache::SSI

+Turned the documentation of Filter config to value of Off so 
 people won't cut and paste the On config by default.

+Added SecureSession config option, which forces session cookie to 
 be sent only under https secured www page requests.

+Added StateDB config option allows use of DB_File for $Session, since 
 default use of SDBM_File is limited.  See StateDB in README.

+file include syntax w/o quotes supported like <!--#include file=test.inc-->

+Nested includes are supported, with includes including each other.
 Recursive includes are detected and errors out when an include has been 
 included 100 times for a script.  Better to quit early than 
 have a process spin out of control. (PORTABLE ? probably not)

+Allow <!--include file=file.inc--> notation w/o quotes around file names

-PerlSetEnv apache conf setting now get passed through to $Request->ServerVariables.
 this update has ServerVariables getting data from %ENV instead of $r->cgi_env

+README FAQ for PerlHandler errors

$VERSION = .08; $DATE="02/06/99";

++SSI with Apache::Filter & Apache::SSI, see config options & ./eg files
 Currently filtering only works in the direction Apache::ASP -> Apache::SSI,
 will not work the other way around, as SSI must come last in a set of filters

+SSI file includes may reference files in the Global directory, better code sharing

- <% @array... %> no longer dropped from code.

+perl =pod comments are stripped from script before compiling, and associated
 PodComments configuration options.

+Command line cgi/asp script takes various options, and allows execution
 of multiple asp scripts at one time.  This script should be used for
 command line debugging.  This is also the beginning of building
 a static site from asp scripts with the -b option, suppressing headers.

+$Response->AddHeader('Set-Cookie') works for multiple cookies.

-$Response->Cookies('foo', '0') works, was dropping 0 because of boolean test

-Fixed up some config doc errors.

$VERSION = .07; $DATE="01/20/99";

 -removed SIG{__WARN__} handler, it was a bad idea.

 -fixes file locking on QNX, work around poor flock porting

 +removed message about Win32::OLE on UNIX platforms from Makefile.PL

 -Better lock garbage collection.  Works with StatINC seemlessly.

 -Multiple select forms now work in array context with $Response->Form()
	@values = $Response->Form('multi');

 -Better CGI.pm compatibility with $r->header_out('Content-type'),
  improved garabage collection under modperl, esp. w/ file uploads

$VERSION = .06; $DATE="12/21/98";

 +Application_OnStart & Application_OnEnd event handlers support.

 -Compatible with CGI.pm 2.46 headers() 

 -Compatible with CGI.pm $q = new CGI({}), caveat: does not set params 

 +use strict; followed by use of objects like $Session is fine.

 -Multiple cookies may be set per script execution.

 +file upload implemented via CGI.pm

 ++global.asa implemented with events Session_OnStart and Session_OnEnd
  working appropriately.

 +StateDir configuration directive implemented.
  StateDir allows the session state directory to be specified separately 
  from the Global directory, useful for OS's with caching filesystems.

 +StateManager config directive.  StateManager specifies how frequently
  Sessions are cleaned up, with 10 (default) meaning that old Sessions
  will be cleaned up 10 times per SessionTimeout period (default 20 minutes).

 +$Application->SessionCount() implemented, non-portable method.
	: returns the number of currently active sessions

 -STOP button fix.  Users may hit STOP button during script 
  execution, and Apache::ASP will cleanup with a routine registered
  in Apache's $r->register_cleanup.  Works well supposedly.

 +PerlScript compatibility work, trying to make ports smoother.
	: Collection emulator, no ->{Count} property
	: $.*(.*)->{Item} parsed automatically, 
	  shedding the ->{Item} for Collection support (? better way ?)
	: No VBScript dates support, just HTTP RFC dates with HTTP::Date
	: Win32::OLE::in not supported, just use "keys %{$Collection}"	

 +./cgi/asp script for testing scripts from the command line
	: will be upgraded to CGI method of doing asp
	: is not "correct" in anyway, so not documented for now
	  but still useful

 +strips DOS carriage returns from scripts automatically, so that
  programs like FrontPage can upload pages to UNIX servers
  without perl choking on the extra \r characters.

$VERSION = .05; $DATE="10/19/98";

+Added PERFORMANCE doc, which includes benchmarks  +hints.

+Better installation warnings and errors for other modules required. 

-Turned off StatINC in eg/.htaccess, as not everyone installs Devel::Symdump

-Fixed AUTOLOAD state bug, which wouldn't let you each through state
 objects, like %{$Session}, or each %$Session, (bug introduced in v.04)

+Parses ASP white space better.  HTML output matches author's intent
 by better dealing with white space surrounding <% perl blocks %>

-Scalar insertion code <%=$foo%> can now span many lines.

+Added include.t test script for includes.

+Script recompiles when included files change.

+Files can be included in script with 
 SSI <!--#include file="filename"--> syntax, needs to be
 done in ASP module to allow compilation of included code and html 
 into script.  Future chaining with Apache::SSI will allow static 
 html includes, and other SSI directives

$VERSION = .04; $DATE="10/14/98";

 +Example script eg/cgi.htm demonstrating CGI.pm use for output.

 +Optimized ASP parsing, faster and more legible executing code
	: try 'die();' in code with setting PerlSetVar Debug 2

 +Cleaned up code for running with 'use strict'

 -Fixed directory handle leak on Solaris, from not closing after opendir()

 +StatINC overhaul.  StatINC setting now works as it should, with 
  the caveat that exported functions will not be refreshed.

 +NoState setting optimization, disallows $Application & $Session

 +$Application->*Lock() functions implemented

 -SoftRedirect setting for those who want scripts to keep running
  after a Redirect()

 +SessionSerialize setting to lock session while script is running
	: Microsoft ASP style session locking
	: For a session, scripts execute one at a time 
	: NOT recommended use, please see note.

 -MLDBM can be used for other things without messing up internal use
	: before if it was used with different DB's and serializers,
	  internal state could be lost.

 --State file locking.  Corruption worries, and loss of data no more.

 +CGI header support, developer can use CGI.pm for *output*, or just print()
	: print "Set-Cookie: test=cookie\n", and things will just work
	: use CGI.pm for output
	: utilizes $r->send_cgi_header(), thanks Doug!

 +Improved Cookie implementation, more flexible and complete
	- Domain cookie key now works
	: Expire times now taken from time(), and relative time in sec
	: Request->Cookies() reading more flexible, with wantarray()
	  on hash cookie values, %hash = $Request->Cookie('test');

 -make test module naming correction, was t.pm, now T.pm for Unix

 +POD / README cleanup, formatting and HTML friendly.

$VERSION = .03; $DATE="09/14/98";

+Installation 'make test' now works

+ActiveX objects on Win32 implemented with $Server->CreateObject() 

+Cookies implemented: $Response->Cookies() & $Request->Cookies()

-Fixed $Response object API, converting some methods to object members.
 Deprecated methods, but backwards compatible.

+Improved error messaging, debug output

+$, influences $Response->Write(@strings) behavior

+perl print() works, sending output to $Response object

+$Response->Write() prints scalars, arrays, and hashes.  Before only scalars.

+Begin implementation of $Server object.

+Implemented $Response->{Expires} and $Response->{ExpiresAbsolute}

+Added "PerlSetVar StatINC" config option

+$0 is aliased to current script filename

+ASP Objects ($Response, etc.) are set in main package
 Thus notation like $main::Response->Write() can be used anywhere.

$VERSION = .02; $DATE="07/12/98";

++Session Manager, won't break under denial of service attack

+Fleshed out $Response, $Session objects, almost full implementation.

+Enormously more documentation.

-Fixed error handling with Debug = 2.

-Documentation fixed for pod2man support.  README now more man-like.

-Stripped \r\n dos characters from installation files

-755 mode set for session state directory when created

-Loads Win32/OLE properly, won't break with UNIX

$VERSION = .01; $DATE="06/26/98";

Syntax Support
--------------
Intial realease, could be considered alpha software.
Allows developers to embed perl in html ASP style.

<!-- sample here -->
<html>
<body>
<% for(1..10) { %>
	counting: <%=$_%> <br>
<% } %>
</body>
</html>

ASP Objects
-----------
$Session, $Application, $Response, $Request objects available
for use in asp pages.

$Session & $Application data is preserved using SDBM files.

$Session id's are tracked through the use of cookies.

Security
--------
Timeouts any attempt to use a session id that doesn't already 
exist.  Should stop hackers, since there is no wire speed guessing
cookies.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1998-2000, Joshua Chamas, Chamas Enterprises Inc.

All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

cpanm Apache::ASP

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Apache::ASP