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

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

DESCRIPTION
    Apache::ASP provides an Active Server Pages port to the Apache Web Server
    with Perl scripting only, and enables developing of dynamic web applications
    with session management and embedded Perl code. There are also many powerful
    extensions, including XML taglibs, XSLT rendering, and new events not
    originally part of the ASP API!

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

    This is a portable solution, similar to ActiveState's PerlScript for NT/IIS
    ASP. Work has been done and will continue to make ports to and from this
    implementation as smooth as possible.

    For Apache::ASP downloading and installation, please read the INSTALL
    section. For installation troubleshooting check the FAQ and the SUPPORT
    sections.

    For database access, ActiveX, scripting languages, and other miscellaneous
    issues please read the FAQ section.

WEBSITE
    The Apache::ASP web site is at http://www.apache-asp.org/ which you can also
    find in the ./site directory of the source distribution.

INSTALL
    The installation process for Apache::ASP is geared towards those with
    experience with Perl, Apache, and unix systems. For those without this
    experience, please understand that the learning curve can be significant.
    But what you have at the end will be a web site running on superior open
    source software.

    If installing onto a Windows operating system, please see the section titled
    Win32 Install.

  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, as well as the "Build Apache" notes in this section.

    Please also see the mod_perl guide at http://perl.apache.org/guide which one
    ought to give a good read before undertaking a mod_perl project.

  Download and CPAN Install
    You may download the latest Apache::ASP from your nearest CPAN, and also:

      http://cpan.org/modules/by-module/Apache/
      ftp://ftp.duke.edu/pub/perl/modules/by-module/Apache/

    As a Perl developer, you should make yourself familiar with the CPAN.pm
    module, and how it may be used to install Apache::ASP, and other related
    modules. The easiest way to install Apache::ASP for the first time from Perl
    is to fire up the CPAN shell like:

     shell prompt> perl -MCPAN -e shell
      ... configure CPAN ...
      ... then upgrade to latest CPAN ...
     cpan> install CPAN
      ...
     cpan> install Bundle::Apache::ASP

    Installing the Apache::ASP bundle will automatically install all the modules
    Apache::ASP is dependent on as well as Apache::ASP itself. If you have
    trouble installing the bundle, then try installing the necessary modules one
    at a time:

     cpan> install MLDBM
     cpan> install MLDBM::Sync
     cpan> install Digest::MD5  *** may not be needed for perl 5.8+ ***
     cpan> install Apache::ASP

    For extra/optional functionality in Apache::ASP 2.31 or greater, like
    support for FormFill, XSLT, or SSI, you can install this bundle via CPAN:

      cpan> install Bundle::Apache::ASP::Extra

  Regular Perl Module Install
    If not doing the CPAN install, download Apache::ASP and install it 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 Web Server & mod_perl
    installed before using this module in a web server environment. The offline
    mode for building static html at ./cgi/asp may be used with just perl.

  Win32 / Windows Install
    If you are on a Win32 platform, like WinNT or Windows 2000, you can download
    the win32 binaries linked to from:

      http://perl.apache.org/distributions.html  

    From here, I would recommend the mod_perl binary installation at:

      ftp://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/pub/other/

    and install the latest perl-win32-bin-*.exe file.

    Randy Kobes has graciously provided these, which include compiled versions
    perl, mod_perl, apache, mod_ssl, as well as all the modules required by
    Apache::ASP and Apache::ASP itself.

    You may also try the more recent Perl-5.8-win32-bin.exe distribution which
    is built on Apache 2. This should be treated as BETA release software until
    mod_perl 2.x is released as stable. Some notes from Randy Kobes about
    getting this release to work are here:

      After installing this distribution, in Apache2\conf\perl.conf
      (pulled in via Apache2\conf\httpd.conf) there's directives that
      have Apache::ASP handle files placed under the Apache2\asp\
      directory. There should be a sample Apache::ASP script there,
      printenv.html, accessed as http://127.0.0.1/asp/printenv.html
      which, if working, will print out your environment variables.

  WinME / 98 / 95 flock() workaround
    For those on desktop Windows operation systems, Apache::ASP v2.25 and later
    needs a special work around for the lack of flock() support on these
    systems. Please add this to your Apache httpd.conf to fix this problem after
    mod_perl is installed:

      <Perl>
       *CORE::GLOBAL::flock = sub { 1 };
      </Perl>
      PerlModule  Apache::ASP

    Please be sure to add this configuration before Apache::ASP is loaded via
    PerlModule, or a PerlRequire statement.

  Linux DSO Distributions
    If you have a linux distribution, like 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,
    and other oddities, and are terrible to debug, because of the strange kinds
    of things that can go wrong.

  Build Apache and mod_perl
    For a quick build of apache, there is a script in the distribution at
    ./make_httpd/build_httpds.sh that can compile a statically linked Apache
    with mod_ssl and mod_perl. Just drop the sources into the make_httpd
    directory, configure the environments as appropriate, and execute the script
    like this:

     make_httpd> ./build_httpds.sh

    You might also find helpful a couple items:

      Stas's mod_perl guide install section
      http://perl.apache.org/guide/install.html

      Apache Toolbox
      http://www.apachetoolbox.com/

    People have been using Apache Toolbox to automate their complex builds with
    great success.

  Quick Start
    Once you have successfully built the Apache Web 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.

    So, you might add this to your Apache httpd.conf file just to get the
    scripts in ./site/eg working, where $DOCUMENT_ROOT represents the
    DocumentRoot config for your apache server:

      <Directory $DOCUMENT_ROOT/asp/eg >
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
      </Directory>

    To copy the entire site, including the examples, you might do a raw
    directory copy as in:

      shell> cp -rpd ./site $DOCUMENT_ROOT/asp

    So you could then reference the Apache::ASP docs at /asp/ at your site, and
    the examples at /asp/eg/ .

    This is not a good production configuration, because it is insecure with the
    FollowSymLinks, and tells Apache to look for .htaccess which is bad for
    performance but it should be handy for getting started with development.

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

CONFIG
    You may use a <Files ...> directive in your httpd.conf Apache configuration
    file to make Apache::ASP start ticking. Configure the optional settings 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!

     PerlModule  Apache::ASP
     <Files ~ (\.asp)>    
       SetHandler  perl-script
       PerlHandler Apache::ASP
       PerlSetVar  Global .
       PerlSetVar  StateDir /tmp/asp
     </Files>

    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 use other Apache configuration tags like <Directory>, <Location>,
    and <VirtualHost>, to separately define ASP configurations, but using the
    <Files> tag is natural for ASP application building because it lends itself
    naturally to mixed media per directory. For building many separate ASP
    sites, you might want to use separate .htaccess files, or <Files> tags in
    <VirtualHost> sections, the latter being better for performance.

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

    This directory is pushed onto @INC, so you will be able to "use" and
    "require" files in this directory, and 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 compile each script into its own perl package, so
    that subroutines defined in one script will not collide with another.

    By default, ASP scripts in a web application are compiled into the *same*
    perl package, 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 .

    Also, multiple includes directories may be set by creating a directory list
    separated by a semicolon ';' as in

      PerlSetVar IncludesDir ../shared;/usr/local/asp/shared

    Using IncludesDir in this way creates an includes search path that would
    look like ., Global, ../shared, /usr/local/asp/shared The current directory
    of the executing script is checked first whenever an include is specified,
    then the Global directory in which the global.asa resides, and finally the
    IncludesDir setting.

    NoCache
    Default 0, if set to 1 will make it so that neither script nor include
    compilations are cached by the server. Using this configuration will save on
    memory but will slow down script execution. Please see the TUNING section
    for other strategies on improving site performance.

      PerlSetVar NoCache 0

  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    

    Note that if you want to dissallow session creation for certain non web
    browser user agents, like search engine spiders, you can use an init handler
    like:

      PerlInitHandler "sub { $_[0]->dir_config('AllowSessionState', 0) }"

    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 operating systems 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 or MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_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 be: SDBM_File, MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File, DB_File, and
    GDBM_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
    Deprecated as of 2.23. There is no equivalent config for the functionality
    this represented from that version on. The 2.23 release represented a
    significant rewrite of the state management, moving to MLDBM::Sync for its
    subsystem.

    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 /   

    CookieDomain
    Default 0, this NON-PORTABLE configuration will allow sessions to span
    multiple web sites that match the same domain root. This is useful if your
    web sites are hosted on the same machine and can share the same StateDir
    configuration, and you want to shared the $Session data across web sites.
    Whatever this is set to, that will add a

      ; domain=$CookieDomain

    part to the Set-Cookie: header set for the session-id cookie.

      PerlSetVar CookieDomain .your.global.domain

    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

    SessionCount
    default 0, if true enables the $Application->SessionCount API which returns
    how many sessions are currently active in the application. This config was
    created because there is a performance hit associated with this count
    tracking, so it is disabled by default.

      PerlSetVar SessionCount 1

  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 SESSIONS 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 web site, 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

    SessionQueryForce
    default 0, set to 1 if you want to disallow the use of cookies for session
    id passing, and only allow session ids to be passed on the query string via
    SessionQuery and SessionQueryParse settings.

      PerlSetVar SessionQueryForce 1

  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, 3 for microtimes
    logged. Use 1 for production debugging, use 2 or 3 for development. Turn off
    if you are not debugging. These settings activate $Response->Debug().

      PerlSetVar Debug 2    

    If Debug 3 is set and Time::HiRes is installed, microtimes will show up in
    the log, and also calculate the time between one $Response->Debug() and
    another, so good for a quick benchmark when you glance at the logs.

      PerlSetVar Debug 3

    If you would like to enable system level debugging, set Debug to a negative
    value. So for system level debugging, but no output to browser:

      PerlSetVar Debug -1

    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

    CollectionItem
    Enables PerlScript syntax like:

      $Request->Form('var')->Item;
      $Request->Form('var')->Item(1);
      $Request->Form('var')->Count;

    Old PerlScript syntax, enabled with

      use Win32::OLE qw(in valof with OVERLOAD);

    is like native syntax

      $Request->Form('var');

    Only in Apache::ASP, can the above be written as:

      $Request->{Form}{var};

    which you would do if you _really_ needed the speed.

  XML / XSLT
    XMLSubsMatch
    default not defined, set to some regexp pattern that will match all XML and
    HTML tags that you want to have perl subroutines handle. The is
    Apache::ASP's custom tag technology, and can be used to create powerful
    extensions to your XML and HTML rendering.

    Please see XML/XSLT section for instructions on its use.

      PerlSetVar XMLSubsMatch my:[\w\-]+

    XMLSubsStrict
    default 0, when set XMLSubs will only take arguments that are properly
    formed XML tag arguments like:

     <my:sub arg1="value" arg2="value" />

    By default, XMLSubs accept arbitrary perl code as argument values:

     <my:sub arg1=1+1 arg2=&perl_sub()/>

    which is not always wanted or expected. Set XMLSubsStrict to 1 if this is
    the case.

      PerlSetVar XMLSubsStrict 1

    XMLSubsPerlArgs
    default 1, when set attribute values will be interpreted as raw perl code so
    that these all would execute as one would expect:

     <my:xmlsubs arg='1' arg2="2" arg3=$value arg4="1 $value" />

    With the 2.45 release, 0 may be set for this configuration or a more ASP
    style variable interpolation:

     <my:xmlsubs arg='1' arg2="2" args3="<%= $value %>" arg4="1 <%= $value %>" />

    This configuration is being introduced experimentally in version 2.45, as it
    will become the eventual default in the 3.0 release.

      PerlSetVar XMLSubsPerlArgs Off

    XSLT
    default not defined, if set to a file, ASP scripts will be regarded as XML
    output and transformed with the given XSL file with XML::XSLT. This XSL file
    will also be executed as an ASP script first, and its output will be the XSL
    data used for the transformation. This XSL file will be executed as a
    dynamic include, so may be located in the current directory, Global, or
    IncludesDir.

    Please see the XML/XSLT section for an explanation of its use.

      PerlSetVar XSLT template.xsl

    XSLTMatch
    default .*, if XSLT is set by default all ASP scripts will be XSL
    transformed by the specified XSL template. This regexp setting will tell
    XSLT which file names to match with doing XSL transformations, so that
    regular HTML ASP scripts and XML ASP scripts can be configured with the same
    configuration block. Please see ./site/eg/.htaccess for an example of its
    use.

      PerlSetVar XSLTMatch \.xml$

    XSLTParser
    default XML::XSLT, determines which perl module to use for XSLT parsing.
    This is a new config as of 2.11. Also supported is XML::Sablotron which does
    not handle XSLT with the exact same output, but is about 10 times faster
    than XML::XSLT. XML::LibXSLT may also be used as of version 2.29, and seems
    to be about twice again as fast as XML::Sablotron, and a very complete XSLT
    implementation.

      PerlSetVar XSLTParser XML::XSLT
      PerlSetVar XSLTParser XML::Sablotron
      PerlSetVar XSLTParser XML::LibXSLT

    XSLTCache
    Activate XSLT file based caching through CacheDB, CacheDir, and CacheSize
    settings. This gives cached XSLT performance near AxKit and greater than
    Cocoon. XSLT caches transformations keyed uniquely by XML & XSLT inputs.

      PerlSetVar XSLTCache 1

    XSLTCacheSize
    as of version 2.11, this config is no longer supported.

  Caching
    The output caching layer is a file dbm based output cache that runs on top
    of the MLDBM::Sync so inherits its performance characteristics. With CacheDB
    set to MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File, the cache layer is very fast at caching
    entries up to 20K in size, but for greater cached items, you should set
    CacheDB to another dbm like DB_File or GDBM_File.

    In order for the cache layer to function properly, whether for
    $Response->Include() output caching, see OBJECTS, or XSLT caching, see
    XML/XSLT, then Apache::ASP must be loaded in the parent httpd like so:

      # httpd.conf
      PerlModule Apache::ASP
        -- or --
      <Perl>
        use Apache::ASP;
      </Perl>

    The cache layer automatically expires entries upon server restart, but for
    this to work, a $ServerID must be computed when the Apache::ASP module gets
    loaded to store in each cached item. Without the above done, each child
    httpd process will get its own $ServerID, so caching will not work at all.

    This said, output caching will not work in raw CGI mode, just running under
    mod_perl.

    CacheDB
    Like StateDB, sets dbm format for caching. Since SDBM_File only support
    key/values pairs of around 1K max in length, the default for this is
    MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File, which is very fast for < 20K output sizes. For
    caching larger data than 20K, DB_File or GDBM_File are probably better to
    use.

      PerlSetVar CacheDB MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File

    For your own benchmarks to test the relative speeds of the various DBMs
    under MLDBM::Sync, which is used by CacheDB, you may run the
    ./bench/bench_sync.pl script from the MLDBM::Sync distribution on your
    system.

    CacheDir
    By default, the cache directory is at StateDir/cache, but CacheDir can be
    used to set the StateDir value for caching purposes. One may want the
    CacheDir separate from StateDir for example StateDir might be a centrally
    network mounted file system, while CacheDir might be a local file cache.

      PerlSetVar CacheDir /tmp/asp_demo

    On a system like Solaris where there is a RAM disk mounted on the system
    like /tmp, I could put the CacheDir there. On a system like Linux where
    files are cached pretty well by default, this is less important.

    CacheSize
    By default, this is 10M of data per cache. When any cache, like the
    XSLTCache, reaches this limit, the cache will be purged by deleting the
    cached dbm files entirely. This is better for long term running of dbms than
    deleting individual records, because dbm formats will often degrade in
    performance with lots of insert & deletes.

    Units of M, K, and B are supported for megabytes, kilobytes, and bytes, with
    the default unit being B, so the following configs all mean the same thing;

      PerlSetVar CacheSize 10M
      PerlSetVar CacheSize 10240K
      PerlSetVar CacheSize 10485760B
      PerlSetVar CacheSize 10485760

    There are 2 caches currently, the XSLTCache, and the Response cache, the
    latter which is currently invoked for caching output from includes with
    special syntax. See $Response->Include() for more info on the Response
    cache.

  Miscellaneous
    AuthServerVariables
    default 0. If you are using basic auth and would like
    $Request->ServerVariables set like AUTH_TYPE, AUTH_USER, AUTH_NAME,
    REMOTE_USER, & AUTH_PASSWD, then set this and Apache::ASP will initialize
    these values from Apache->*auth* commands. Use of these environment
    variables keeps applications cross platform compatible as other servers set
    these too when performing basic 401 auth.

      PerlSetVar AuthServerVariables 0

    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

    InodeNames
    Default 0. Set to 1 to uses a stat() call on scripts and includes to derive
    subroutine namespace based on device and inode numbers. In case of multiple
    symbolic links pointing to the same script this will result in the script
    being compiled only once. Use only on unix flavours which support the stat()
    call that know about device and inode numbers.

      PerlSetVar InodeNames 1

    RequestParams
    Default 0, if set creates $Request->Params object with combined contents of
    $Request->QueryString and $Request->Form. This is for developer convenience
    simlar to CGI.pm's param() method.

      PerlSetVar RequestParams 1

    RequestBinaryRead
    Default On, if set to Off will not read POST data into $Request->Form().

    One potential reason for configuring this to Off might be to initialize the
    Apache::ASP object in an Apache handler phase earlier than the normal
    PerlRequestHandler phase, so that it does not interfere with normal reading
    of POST data later in the request.

      PerlSetVar RequestBinaryRead On

    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". If in doubt, try building your
    mod_perl with

      perl Makefile.PL EVERYTHING=1

    With filtering through Apache::SSI, you should expect near a a 20%
    performance decrease.

      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

    CompressGzip
    default 0, if true will gzip compress HTML output on the fly if
    Compress::Zlib is installed, and the client browser supports it. Depending
    on the HTML being compressed, the client may see a 50% to 90% reduction in
    HTML output. I have seen 40K of HTML squeezed down to just under 6K. This
    will come at a 5%-20% hit to CPU usage per request compressed.

    Note there are some cases when a browser says it will accept gzip encoding,
    but then not render it correctly. This behavior has been seen with IE5 when
    set to use a proxy but not using a proxy, and the URL does not end with a
    .html or .htm. No work around has yet been found for this case so use at
    your own risk.

      PerlSetVar CompressGzip 1

    FormFill
    default 0, if true will auto fill HTML forms with values from
    $Request->Form(). This functionality is provided by use of HTML::FillInForm.
    For more information please see "perldoc HTML::FillInForm", and the example
    ./site/eg/formfill.asp.

    This feature can be enabled on a per form basis at runtime with
    $Response->{FormFill} = 1

      PerlSetVar FormFill 1

    TimeHiRes
    default 0, if set and Time::HiRes is installed, will do sub second timing of
    the time it takes Apache::ASP to process a request. This will not include
    the time spent in the session manager, nor modperl or Apache, and is only a
    rough approximation at best.

    If Debug is set also, you will get a comment in your HTML output that
    indicates the time it took to process that script.

    If system debugging is set with Debug -1 or -2, you will also get this time
    in the Apache error log with the other system messages.

  Mail Administration
    Apache::ASP has some powerful administrative email extensions that let you
    sleep at night, knowing full well that if an error occurs at the web site,
    you will know about it immediately. With these features already enabled, it
    was also easy to provide the $Server->Mail(\%mail) API extension which you
    can read up about in the OBJECTS section.

    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.foobar

    MailFrom
    Default NONE, set this to specify the default mail address placed in the
    From: mail header for the $Server->Mail() API extension, as well as
    MailErrorsTo and MailAlertTo.

      PerlSetVar MailFrom youremail@yourdomain.com.foobar

    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
  General
    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.

  XMLSubs
    XMLSubs allows a developer to define custom handlers for HTML & XML tags,
    which can extend the natural syntax of the ASP environment. Configured like:

      PerlSetVar XMLSubsMatch site:\w+

    A simple tag like:

      <site:header title="Page Title" />

    can be constructed that could translate into:

      sub site::header {
          my $args = shift;
          print "<html><head><title>$args->{title}</title></head>\n";
          print "<body bgcolor=white>\n";
      }

    Better yet, one can use this functionality to trap and post process embedded
    HTML & XML like:

      <site:page title="Page Title">
        ... some HTML here ...
      </site:page>

    and then:

      sub site::page {
        my($args, $html) = @_;
        &site::header($args);
        $main::Response->Write($html);
        $main::Response->Write("</body></html>");
      }

    Though this could be used to fully render XML documents, it was not built
    for this purpose, but to add powerful tag extensions to HTML development
    environments. For full XML rendering, you ought to try an XSLT approach,
    also supported by Apache::ASP.

  Editors
    As Apache::ASP supports a mixing of perl and HTML, any editor which supports
    development of one or the other would work well. The following editors are
    known to work well for developing Apache::ASP web sites:

     * Emacs, in perl or HTML modes.  For a mmm-mode config
       that mixes HTML & perl modes in a single buffer, check 
       out the editors/mmm-asp-perl.el file in distribution.

     * Microsoft Frontpage

     * Vim, special syntax support with editors/aasp.vim file in distribution.

     * UltraEdit32 ( http://www.ultraedit.com/ ) has syntax highlighting, 
       good macros and a configurable wordlist (so one can have syntax 
       highlighting both for Perl and HTML).

    Please feel free to suggest your favorite development environment for this
    list.

EVENTS
  Overview
    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
            Script_OnFlush *        Before $Response being flushed to client.
            Script_OnParse *        Before script compilation
            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. For some web applications that are always busy,
    the Application_OnEnd event may never occur.

  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
    $Response->End() is called, since the program execution ends immediately at
    this event. To always run critical code, use the API extension:

            $Server->RegisterCleanup()

  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.

  Script_OnFlush
    API extension. This event will be called prior to flushing the $Response
    buffer to the web client. At this time, the $Response->{BinaryRef} buffer
    reference may be used to modify the buffered output at runtime to apply
    global changes to scripts output without having to modify all the scripts.

     sub Script_OnFlush {
       my $ref = $Response->{BinaryRef};
       $$ref =~ s/\s+/ /sg; # to strip extra white space
     }

    Check out the ./site/eg/global.asa for an example of its use.

  Script_OnParse
    This event allows one to set up a source filter on the script text, allowing
    one to change the script on the fly before the compilation stage occurs. The
    script text is available in the $Server->{ScriptRef} scalar reference, and
    can be accessed like so:

     sub Script_OnParse {
       my $code = $Server->{ScriptRef}
       $$code .= " ADDED SOMETHING ";
     }

  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.

  Server_OnStart ( pseudo-event )
    Some might want something like a Server_OnStart event, where some code gets
    runs when the web server starts. In mod_perl, this is easy to achieve
    outside of the scope of an ASP application, by putting some initialization
    code into a <Perl> section in the httpd.conf file. Initializations that you
    would like to be shared with the child httpds are particularly useful, one
    such being the Apache::ASP->Loader() routine which you can read more about
    in the TUNING section - Precompile Scripts subsection. It is could be called
    like:

      # httpd.conf
      <Perl>
         Apache::ASP->Loader($path, $pattern, %config)
      </Perl>

    So a <Perl> section is your Server_OnStart routine!

  mod_perl handlers
    If one wants to extend one's environment with mod_perl handlers, Apache::ASP
    does not stop this. Basic use of Apache::ASP in fact only involves the
    content handler phase of mod_perl's PerlHandler, like

      SetHandler perl-script
      PerlModule Apache::ASP
      PerlHandler Apache::ASP 

    But mod_perl allows for direct access to many more Apache event stages, for
    full list try "perldoc mod_perl" or buy the mod_perl Eagle book. Some
    commonly used ones are:

      PerlInitHandler
      PerlTransHandler
      PerlFixupHandler
      PerlHandler
      PerlLogHandler
      PerlCleanupHandler

    For straight Apache::ASP programming, there are some equivalents, say
    Script_OnStart event instead of Init/Fixup stages, or
    $Server->RegisterCleanup() for Log/Cleanup stages, but you can do things in
    the mod_perl handlers that you cannot do in Apache::ASP, especially if you
    want to handle all files globally, and not just ASP scripts.

    For many Apache::* modules for use with mod_perl, of which Apache::ASP is
    just one, check out http://perl.apache.org/src/apache-modlist.html

    To gain access to the ASP objects like $Session outside in a non-PerlHandler
    mod_perl handler, you may use this API:

      my $ASP = Apache::ASP->new($r); # $r is Apache->request object

    as in this possible Authen handler:

      <Perl>
        use Apache::ASP;
        sub My::Auth::handler {
          my $r = shift;
          my $ASP = Apache::ASP->new($r) 
          my $Session = $ASP->Session;
        }
      </Perl>

    Here are some examples of do-it-yourself mod_perl handler programming...

     === Forbid Bad HSlide User Agent ===

     # httpd.conf
     PerlAccessHandler My::Access
     <Perl>
       sub My::Access::handler {
         my $r = shift;
         if($r->headers_in->{'USER_AGENT'} =~ /HSlide/) {
             403;
         } else {
             200;
         }
       }
     </Perl>

     === Runtime Path Parsing ===

    This example shows how one might take an arbitrary URL path
    /$path/$file.asp, and turn that into a runtime config for your site, so your
    scripts get executed always in your sites DocumentRoot.

     INPUT URL /SomeCategory/
     OUTPUT
      Script: index.asp
      $Server->Config('PATH') eq '/SomeCategory'

     INPUT URL /SomeCategory/index.asp
     OUTPUT
      Script: index.asp
      $Server->Config('PATH') eq '/SomeCategory'

     INPUT URI /index.asp
     OUTPUT
      Script: index.asp
      $Server->Config('PATH') eq ''

     # httpd.conf
     PerlTransHandler My::Init
     use lib qw( $custom_perllib );

     # $custom_perllib/My/Init.pm
     package My::Init;
     use strict;
     use Apache::Constants qw(:common);
     sub handler {
        my $r = shift;

        my $uri = $r->uri || '/';
        unless($uri =~ m|^(.*)(/([^/.]+\.[\w]+)?)$|i) {
            warn("can't parse uri $uri");
            return DECLINED;
        }
        $uri = $2;
        my $PATH = $1 || '';
        $r->dir_config('PATH', $PATH);

        if($uri eq '/') {
            $uri = '/index.asp';
        }

        $r->uri($uri);
        $r->filename($r->document_root.$uri);

        DECLINED;
     }

     1;

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.

    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 methods

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

    If you would like to define your own global objects for use in your scripts
    and includes, you can initialize them in the global.asa Script_OnStart like:

     use vars qw( $Form $Site ); # declare globals
     sub Script_OnStart {
         $Site = My::Site->new;  # init $Site object
         $Form = $Request->Form; # alias form data
         $Server->RegisterCleanup(sub { # garbage collection
                                      $Site->DESTROY; 
                                      $Site = $Form = undef; 
                                  });
     }

    In this way you can create site wide application objects and simple aliases
    for common functions.

  $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->{BinaryRef}
        API extension. This is a perl reference to the buffered output of the
        $Response object, and can be used in the Script_OnFlush global.asa event
        to modify the buffered output at runtime to apply global changes to
        scripts output without having to modify all the scripts. These changes
        take place before content is flushed to the client web browser.

         sub Script_OnFlush {
           my $ref = $Response->{BinaryRef};
           $$ref =~ s/\s+/ /sg; # to strip extra white space
         }

        Check out the ./site/eg/global.asa for an example of its use.

    $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-Type
        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. This setting may also be useful even if
        using compression to obfuscate HTML.

    $Response->{ContentType} = "text/html"
        Sets the MIME type for the current response being sent to the client.
        Sent as an HTTP header.

    $Response->{Debug} = 1|0
        API extension. Default set to value of Debug config. May be used to
        temporarily activate or inactivate $Response->Debug() behavior.
        Something like:

         {
           local $Response->{Debug} = 1;
           $Response->Debug($values);
         }

        maybe be used to always log something. The Debug() method can be better
        than AppendToLog() because it will log data in data structures one level
        deep, whereas AppendToLog prints just raw string/scalar values.

    $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->{FormFill} = 0|1
        If true, HTML forms generated by the script output will be auto filled
        with data from $Request->Form. This feature requires HTML::FillInForm to
        be installed. Please see the FormFill CONFIG for more information.

        This setting overrides the FormFill config at runtime for the script
        execution only.

    $Response->{IsClientConnected}
        1 if web client is connected, 0 if not. This value starts set to 1, and
        will be updated whenever a $Response->Flush() is called. If BufferingOn
        is set, by default $Response->Flush() will only be called at the end of
        the HTML output.

        As of version 2.23 this value is updated correctly before global.asa
        Script_OnStart is called, so global script termination may be correctly
        handled during that event, which one might want to do with excessive
        user STOP/RELOADS when the web server is very busy.

        An API extension $Response->IsClientConnected may be called for
        refreshed connection status without calling first a $Response->Flush

    $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. The @args can be found in @_ in the includes like:

          # include.inc
          <% my @args = @_; %>

        As of 2.23, multiple return values can be returned from an include like:

         my @rv = $Response->Include($filename, @args);

    $Response->Include(\%cache_args, @sub_args) *CACHE API*
        As of version 2.23, output from an include may be cached with this API
        and the CONFIG settings CacheDir & CacheDB. This can be used to execute
        expensive includes only rarely where applicable, drastically increasing
        performance in some cases.

        This API extension applies to the entire include family:

          my @rv = $Response->Include(\%cache_args, @include_args)
          my $html_ref = $Response->TrapInclude(\%cache_args, @include_args)
          $Server->Execute(\%cache_args, @include_args)

        For this output cache to work, you must load Apache::ASP in the Apache
        parent httpd like so:

          # httpd.conf
          PerlModule Apache::ASP

        The cache arguments are shown here

          $Response->Include({
            File => 'file.inc',
            Cache => 1, # to activate cache layer
            Expires => 3600, # to expire in one hour
            LastModified => time() - 600, # to expire if cached before 10 minutes ago
            Key => $Request->Form, # to cache based on checksum of serialized form data,
            Clear => 1, # always executes include & cache output
          }, @include_args);

          File - include file to execute, can be file name or \$script 
            script data passed in as a string reference.

          Cache - activate caching, will run like normal include without this

          Expires - only cache for this long in seconds

          LastModified - if cached before this time(), expire

          Key - The cache item identity.  Can be $data, \$data, \%data, \@data, 
            this data is serialized and combined with the filename & @include_args 
            to create a MD5 checksum to fetch from the cache with. If you wanted
            to cache the results of a search page from form data POSTed, 
            then this key could be 

              { Key => $Request->Form }

          Clear - If set to 1, or boolean true, will always execute the include 
            and update the cache entry for it.

        Motivation: If an include takes 1 second to execute because of complex
        SQL to a database, and you can cache the output of this include because
        it is not realtime data, and the cache layer runs at .01 seconds, then
        you have a 100 fold savings on that part of the script. Site scalability
        can be dramatically increased in this way by intelligently caching
        bottlenecks in the web application.

        Use Sparingly: If you have a fast include, then it may execute faster
        than the cache layer runs, in which case you may actually slow your site
        down by using this feature. Therefore try to use this sparingly, and
        only when sure you really need it. Apache::ASP scripts generally execute
        very quickly, so most developers will not need to use this feature at
        all.

    $Response->Include(\$script_text, @args)
        Added in Apache::ASP 2.11, this method allows for executing ASP scripts
        that are generated dynamically by passing in a reference to the script
        data instead of the file name. This works just like the normal
        $Response->Include() API, except a string reference is passed in instead
        of a filename. For example:

          <%
            my $script = "<\% print 'TEST'; %\>";
            $Response->Include(\$script);
          %>

        This include would output TEST. Note that tokens like <% and %> must be
        escaped so Apache::ASP does not try to compile those code blocks
        directly when compiling the original script. If the $script data were
        fetched directly from some external resource like a database, then these
        tokens would not need to be escaped at all as in:

          <%
            my $script = $dbh->selectrow_array(
               "select script_text from scripts where script_id = ?",
               undef, $script_id
               );
            $Response->Include(\$script);
          %>

        This method could also be used to render other types of dynamic scripts,
        like XML docs using XMLSubs for example, though for complex runtime XML
        rendering, one should use something better suited like XSLT. See the
        $Server->XSLT API for more on this topic.

    $Response->IsClientConnected()
        API Extension. 1 for web client still connected, 0 if disconnected which
        might happen if the user hits the stop button. The original API for this
        $Response->{IsClientConnected} is only updated after a $Response->Flush
        is called, so this method may be called for a refreshed status.

        Note $Response->Flush calls $Response->IsClientConnected to update
        $Response->{IsClientConnected} so to use this you are going straight to
        the source! But if you are doing a loop like:

          while(@data) {
            $Response->End if ! $Response->{IsClientConnected};
            my $row = shift @data;
            %> <%= $row %> <%
            $Response->Flush;
          }

        Then its more efficient to use the member instead of the method since
        $Response->Flush() has already updated that value for you.

    $Response->Redirect($url)
        Sends the client a command to go to a different url $url. Script
        immediately ends.

    $Response->TrapInclude($file, @args)
        Calls $Response->Include() with same arguments as passed to it, but
        instead traps the include output buffer and returns it as as a perl
        string reference. This allows one to postprocess the output buffer
        before sending to the client.

          my $string_ref = $Response->TrapInclude('file.inc');
          $$string_ref =~ s/\s+/ /sg; # squash whitespace like Clean 1
          print $$string_ref;

        The data is returned as a referenece to save on what might be a large
        string copy. You may dereference the data with the $$string_ref
        notation.

    $Response->Write($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->{Method}
        API extension. Returns the client HTTP request method, as in GET or
        POST. Added in version 2.31.

    $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 string whose contents are the first $length bytes of the form
        data, or body, sent by the client request. If $length is not given, will
        return all of the form data. This data is the raw data sent by the
        client, without any parsing done on it by Apache::ASP.

        Note that BinaryRead will not return any data for file uploads. Please
        see the $Request->FileUpload() interface for access to this data.
        $Request->Form() data will also be available as normal.

    $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()
        collection. 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. One can use this hash to create a nice alias to the form data
        like:

         # in global.asa
         use vars qw( $Form );
         sub Script_OnStart {
           $Form = $Request->Form;
         }
         # then in ASP scripts
         <%= $Form->{var} %>

        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

    $Request->Params($name)
        API extension. If RequestParams CONFIG is set, the $Request->Params
        object is created with combined contents of $Request->QueryString and
        $Request->Form. This is for developer convenience simlar to CGI.pm's
        param() method. Just like for $Response->Form, one could create a nice
        alias like:

         # in global.asa
         use vars qw( $Params );
         sub Script_OnStart {
           $Params = $Request->Params;
         }

    $Request->QueryString($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, and is enabled by the SessionCount configuration
        setting. This method is not implemented as part of the original 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.

  $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.

    $Server->Config($setting)
        API extension. Allows a developer to read the CONFIG settings, like
        Global, GlobalPackage, StateDir, etc. Currently implemented as a wrapper
        around

          Apache->dir_config($setting)

        May also be invoked as $Server->Config(), which will return a hash ref
        of all the PerlSetVar settings.

    $Server->CreateObject($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.

    $Server->Execute($file, @args)
        New method from ASP 3.0, this does the same thing as

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

        and internally is just a wrapper for such. Seems like we had this
        important functionality before the IIS/ASP camp!

    $Server->File()
        Returns the absolute file path to current executing script. Same as
        Apache->request->filename when running under mod_perl.

        ASP API extension.

    $Server->GetLastError()
        Not implemented, will likely not ever be because this is dependent on
        how IIS handles errors and is not relevant in Apache.

    $Server->HTMLEncode( $string || \$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.

        As of version 2.23, $Server->HTMLEncode() may take a string reference
        for an optmization when encoding a large buffer as an API extension.
        Here is how one might use one over the other:

          my $buffer = '&' x 100000;
          $buffer = $Server->HTMLEncode($buffer);
          print $buffer;
            - or -
          my $buffer = '&' x 100000;
          $Server->HTMLEncode(\$buffer);
          print $buffer;

        Using the reference passing method in benchmarks on 100K of data was 5%
        more efficient, but maybe useful for some. It saves on copying the 100K
        buffer twice.

    $Server->MapInclude($include)
        API extension. Given the include $include, as an absolute or relative
        file name to the current executing script, this method returns the file
        path that the include would be found from the include search path. The
        include search path is the current script directory, Global, and
        IncludesDir directories.

        If the include is not found in the includes search path, then undef, or
        bool false, is returned. So one may do something like this:

          if($Server->MapInclude('include.inc')) {
            $Response->Include('include.inc');
          }

        This code demonstrates how one might only try to execute an include if
        it exists, which is useful since a script will error if it tries to
        execute an include that does not exist.

    $Server->MapPath($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->Mail(\%mail, %smtp_args);
        With the Net::SMTP and Net::Config modules installed, which are part of
        the perl libnet package, you may use this API extension to send email.
        The \%mail hash reference that you pass in must have values for at least
        the To, From, and Subject headers, and the Body of the mail message.

        The return value of this routine is 1 for success, 0 for failure. If the
        MailHost SMTP server is not available, this will have a return value of
        0.

        You could send an email like so:

         $Server->Mail({
                        To => 'somebody@yourdomain.com.foobar',
                        From => 'youremail@yourdomain.com.foobar',
                        Subject => 'Subject of Email',
                        Body => 
                         'Body of message. '.
                         'You might have a lot to say here!',
                        Organization => 'Your Organization',
                        CC => 'youremailcc@yourdomain.com.foobar',
                        BCC => 'youremailbcc@yourdomain.com.foobar',
                        Debug => 0 || 1,
                       });

        Any extra fields specified for the email will be interpreted as headers
        for the email, so to send an HTML email, you could set 'Content-Type' =>
        'text/html' in the above example.

        If you have MailFrom configured, this will be the default for the From
        header in your email. For more configuration options like the MailHost
        setting, check out the CONFIG section.

        The return value of this method call will be boolean for success of the
        mail being sent.

        If you would like to specially configure the Net::SMTP object used
        internally, you may set %smtp_args and they will be passed on when that
        object is initialized. "perldoc Net::SMTP" for more into on this topic.

        If you would like to include the output of an ASP page as the body of
        the mail message, you might do something like:

          my $mail_body = $Response->TrapInclude('mail_body.inc');
          $Server->Mail({ %mail, Body => $$mail_body });

    $Server->RegisterCleanup($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.

    $Server->Transfer($file, @args)
        New method from ASP 3.0. Transfers control to another script. The
        Response buffer will not be cleared automatically, so if you want this
        to serve as a faster $Response->Redirect(), you will need to call
        $Response->Clear() before calling this method.

        This new script will take over current execution and the current script
        will not continue to be executed afterwards. It differs from Execute()
        because the original script will not pick up where it left off.

        As of Apache::ASP 2.31, this method now accepts optional arguments like
        $Response->Include & $Server->Execute. $Server->Transfer is now just a
        wrapper for:

          $Response->Include($file, @args);
          $Response->End;

    $Server->URLEncode($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.

    $Server->URL($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 setting in the
        CONFIG section, and the SESSIONS section too.

    $Server->XSLT(\$xsl_data, \$xml_data)
         * NON-PORTABLE API EXTENSION *

        This method takes string references for XSL and XML data and returns the
        XSLT output as a string reference like:

          my $xslt_data_ref = $Server->XSLT(\$xsl_data, \$xml_data)
          print $$xslt_data_ref;

        The XSLT parser defaults to XML::XSLT, and is configured with the
        XSLTParser setting, which can also use XML::Sablotron ( support added in
        2.11 ), and XML::LibXSLT ( support added in 2.29 ). Please see the
        CONFIG section for more information on the XSLT* settings that drive
        this API. The XSLT setting itself uses this API internally to do its
        rendering.

        This API was created to allow developers easy XSLT component rendering
        without having to render the entire ASP scripts via XSLT. This will make
        an easy plugin architecture for those looking to integrate XML into
        their existing ASP application frameworks.

        At some point, the API will likely take files as arguments, but not as
        of the 2.11 release.

SSI
    SSI is great! One of the main features of server side includes 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 :)

SESSIONS
    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/session_query_parse.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.

XML/XSLT
  Custom Tags with XMLSubsMatch
    Before XML, there was the need to make HTML markup smarter. Apache::ASP
    gives you the ability to have a perl subroutine handle the execution of any
    predefined tag, taking the tag descriptors, and the text contained between,
    as arguments of the subroutine. This custom tag technology can be used to
    extend a web developer's abilities to add dynamic pieces without having to
    visibly use <% %> style code entries.

    So, lets say that you have a table that you want to insert for an employee
    with contact info and the like, you could set up a tag like:

     <my:new-employee name="Jane" last="Doe" phone="555-2222">
       Jane Doe has been here since 1998.
     </my:new-employee>

    To render it with a custom tag, you would tell the Apache::ASP parser to
    render the tag with a subroutine:

      PerlSetVar XMLSubsMatch my:new-employee

    Any colons, ':', in the XML custom tag will turn into '::', a perl package
    separator, so the my:employee tag would translate to the my::employee
    subroutine, or the employee subroutine in the my package. Any dash "-" will
    also be translated to an underscore "_", as dash is not valid in the names
    of perl subroutines.

    Then you would create the my::employee subroutine in the my perl package or
    whereever like so:

      package my;
      sub new_employee {
        my($attributes, $body) = @_;
        $main::Response->Include('new_employee.inc', $attributes, $body);
      }
      1;

      <!-- # new_employee.inc file somewhere else, maybe in Global directory -->
      <% my($attributes, $body) = @_; %>
      <table>
      <% for('name', 'last', 'phone') { %>
        <tr>
          <td><b><%=ucfirst $_ %></b>:</td>
          <td><%= $attributes->{$_} %></td>
        </tr>
      <% } %>
      <tr><td colspan=2><%= $body %></td></tr>
      </table>
      <!-- # end new_employee.inc file -->

    The $main::Response->Include() would then delegate the rendering of the
    new-employee to the new_employee.inc ASP script include.

    Though XML purists would not like this custom tag technology to be related
    to XML, the reality is that a careful site engineer could render full XML
    documents with this technology, applying all the correct styles that one
    might otherwise do with XSLT.

    Custom tags defined in this way can be used as XML tags are defined with
    both a body and without as it

      <my:new-employee>...</my:new-employee>

    and just

      <my:new-employee />

    These tags are very powerful in that they can also enclose normal ASP logic,
    like:

      <my:new-employee>
        <!-- normal ASP logic -->
        <% my $birthday = &HTTP::Date::time2str(time - 25 * 86400 * 365); %>

        <!-- ASP inserts -->
        This employee has been online for <%= int(rand()*600)+1 %>
        seconds, and was born near <%= $birthday %>.
      </my:new-employee>   

    For an example of this custom XML tagging in action, please check out the
    ./site/eg/xml_subs.asp script.

  XSLT Tranformations
    XML is good stuff, but what can you use it for? The principle is that by
    having data and style separated in XML and XSL files, you can reformat your
    data more easily in the future, and you can render your data in multiple
    formats, just as easily as for your web site, so you might render your site
    to a PDA, or a cell phone just as easily as to a browser, and all you have
    to do is set up the right XSL stylesheets to do the transformation (XSLT).

    With native XML/XSLT support, Apache::ASP scripts may be the source of XML
    data that the XSL file transforms, and the XSL file itself will be first
    executed as an ASP script also. The XSLT transformation is handled by
    XML::XSLT or XML::Sablotron and you can see an example of it in action at
    the ./site/eg/xslt.xml XML script.

    To specify a XSL stylesheet, use the setting:

      PerlSetVar XSLT template.xsl

    where template.xsl could be any file. By default this will XSLT transform
    all ASP scripts so configured, but you can separate xml scripts from the
    rest with the setting:

      PerlSetVar XSLTMatch xml$

    where all files with the ending xml would undergo a XSLT transformation.

    Note that XSLT depends on the installation of XML::XSLT, which in turn
    depends on XML::DOM, and XML::Parser. As of version 2.11, XML::Sablotron may
    also be used by setting:

      PerlSetVar XSLTParser XML::Sablotron

    and XML::LibXSLT may be used, as of 2.29, by setting

      PerlSetVar XSLTParser XML::LibXSLT

    If you would like to install XML::Sablotron or XML::LibXSLT, you will first
    have to install the libraries that these perl modules use, which you can get
    at:

      libxslt - The XSLT C Library for Gnome
      http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/

      Sablotron - Ginger Alliance
      http://www.gingerall.com

    For more on XML::XSLT, the default XSLT engine that Apache::ASP will use,
    please see:

      XML::XSLT
      http://xmlxslt.sourceforge.net/

    XML:XSLT was the first supported XSLT engine as has the benefit of being
    written in pure perl so that though while it is slower than the other
    solutions, it is easier to port.

    If you would like to cache XSLT tranformations, which is highly recommended,
    just set:

      PerlSetVar XSLTCache 1

    Please see the Cache settings in the CONFIG section for more about how to
    configure the XSLTCache.

  References
    For more information about XSLT, please see the standard at:

      http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt

    For their huge ground breaking XML efforts, these other XML OSS projects
    need mention:

      Cocoon - XML-based web publishing, in Java 
      http://cocoon.apache.org/

      AxKit - XML web publishing with Apache & mod_perl
      http://www.axkit.org/

CGI
    CGI has been the standard way of deploying web applications long before ASP
    came along. In the CGI gateway world, CGI.pm has been a widely used module
    in building CGI applications, and Apache::ASP is compatible with scripts
    written with CGI.pm. Also, as of version 2.19, Apache::ASP can run in
    standalone CGI mode for the Apache web server without mod_perl being
    available. See "Standalone CGI Mode" section below.

    Following are some special notes with respect to compatibility with CGI and
    CGI.pm. 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.

    Standalone CGI Mode, without mod_perl
        As of version 2.19, Apache::ASP scripts may be run as standalone CGI
        scripts without mod_perl being loaded into Apache. Work to date has only
        been done with mod_cgi scripts under Apache on a Unix platform, and it
        is unlikely to work under other web servers or Win32 operating systems
        without further development.

        To run the ./site/eg scripts as CGI scripts, you copy the ./site
        directory to some location accessible by your web server, in this
        example its /usr/local/apache/htdocs/aspcgi, then in your httpd.conf
        activate Apache::ASP cgi scripts like so:

         Alias /aspcgi/ /usr/local/apache/htdocs/aspcgi/
         <Directory /usr/local/apache/htdocs/aspcgi/eg/ >
           AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .htm
           AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .html
           AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .asp
           AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .xml
           AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .ssi
           AllowOverride None
           Options +ExecCGI +Indexes
         </Directory>

        Then install the asp-perl script from the distribution into /usr/bin, or
        some other directory. This is so the CGI execution line at the top of
        those scripts will invoke the asp-perl wrapper like so:

         #!/usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/asp-perl

        The asp-perl script is a cgi wrapper that sets up the Apache::ASP
        environment in lieu of the normal mod_perl handler request. Because
        there is no Apache->dir_config() data available under mod_cgi, the
        asp-perl script will load a asp.conf file that may define a hash %Config
        of data for populating the dir_config() data. An example of a complex
        asp.conf file is at ./site/eg/asp.conf

        So, a trivial asp.conf file might look like:

         # asp.conf
         %Config = (
           'Global' => '.',
           'StateDir' => '/tmp/aspstate',
           'NoState' => 0,
           'Debug' => 3,
         );

        The default for NoState is 1 in CGI mode, so one must set NoState to 0
        for objects like $Session & $Application to be defined.

    CGI.pm
        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.

        For more information about CGI.pm, please see the web site

          http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/

    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.
        Also, for more details about CGI.pm itself, please see the web site:

            http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/

        Occasionally, a newer version of CGI.pm will be released which breaks
        file upload compatibility with Apache::ASP. If you find this to occur,
        then you might consider downgrading to a version that works. For
        example, one can install a working CGI.pm v2.78 for a working version,
        and to get old versions of this module, one can go to BACKPAN at:

            http://backpan.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/L/LD/LDS/

        There is also $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.

    New as of version 2.05 is new functionality enabled with the CollectionItem
    setting, to giver better support to more recent PerlScript syntax. This
    seems helpful when porting from an IIS/PerlScript code base. Please see the
    CONFIG section for more info.

    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.

STYLE GUIDE
    Here are some general style guidelines. Treat these as tips for best
    practices on Apache::ASP development if you will.

  UseStrict
    One of perl's blessings is also its bane, variables do not need to be
    declared, and are by default globally scoped. The problem with this in
    mod_perl is that global variables persist from one request to another even
    if a different web browser is viewing a page.

    To avoid this problem, perl programmers have often been advised to add to
    the top of their perl scripts:

      use strict;

    In Apache::ASP, you can do this better by setting:

      PerlSetVar UseStrict 1

    which will cover both script & global.asa compilation and will catch "use
    strict" errors correctly. For perl modules, please continue to add "use
    strict" to the top of them.

    Because its so essential in catching hard to find errors, this configuration
    will likely become the default in some future release. For now, keep setting
    it.

  Do not define subroutines in scripts.
    DO NOT add subroutine declarations in scripts. Apache::ASP is optimized by
    compiling a script into a subroutine for faster future invocation. Adding a
    subroutine definition to a script then looks like this to the compiler:

      sub page_script_sub {
        ...
        ... some HTML ...
        ...
        sub your_sub {
          ...
        }
        ...
      }

    The biggest problem with subroutines defined in subroutines is the side
    effect of creating closures, which will not behave as usually desired in a
    mod_perl environment. To understand more about closures, please read up on
    them & "Nested Subroutines" at:

      http://perl.apache.org/docs/general/perl_reference/perl_reference.html

    Instead of defining subroutines in scripts, you may add them to your sites
    global.asa, or you may create a perl package or module to share with your
    scripts. For more on perl objects & modules, please see:

      http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perlobj.html

  Use global.asa's Script_On* Events
    Chances are that you will find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly in
    each of your web application's scripts. You can use Script_OnStart and
    Script_OnEnd to automate these routine tasks. These events are called before
    and after each script request.

    For example, let's say you have a header & footer you would like to include
    in the output of every page, then you might:

     # global.asa
     sub Script_OnStart {
       $Response->Include('header.inc');
     }
     sub Script_OnEnd {
       $Response->Include('footer.inc');
     }

    Or let's say you want to initialize a global database connection for use in
    your scripts:

     # global.asa
     use Apache::DBI;   # automatic persistent database connections
     use DBI;

     use vars qw($dbh); # declare global $dbh

     sub Script_OnStart {
       # initialize $dbh
       $dbh = DBI->connect(...);

       # force you to explicitly commit when you want to save data
       $Server->RegisterCleanup(sub { $dbh->rollback; });
     }

     sub Script_OnEnd {
       # not really necessary when using persistent connections, but
       # will free this one object reference at least
       $dbh = undef;
     }

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

  Installation
    Examples don't work, I see the ASP script in the browser?
    This is most likely that Apache is not configured to execute the Apache::ASP
    scripts properly. Check the INSTALL QuickStart section for more info on how
    to quickly set up Apache to execute your ASP scripts.

    Apache Expat vs. XML perl parsing causing segfaults, what do I do?
    Make sure to compile apache with expat disabled. The
    ./make_httpd/build_httpds.sh in the distribution will do this for you, with
    the --disable-rule=EXPAT in particular:

     cd ../$APACHE
     echo "Building apache =============================="
     ./configure \
        --prefix=/usr/local/apache \
        --activate-module=src/modules/perl/libperl.a \
        --enable-module=ssl \
        --enable-module=proxy \
        --enable-module=so \
        --disable-rule=EXPAT

                       ^^^^^

    keywords: segmentation fault, segfault seg fault

    Why do variables retain their values between requests?
    Unless scoped by my() or local(), perl variables in mod_perl are treated as
    globals, and values set may persist from one request to another. This can be
    seen in as simple a script as this:

      <HTML><BODY>
        $counter++;
        $Response->Write("<BR>Counter: $counter");
      </BODY></HTML>

    The value for $counter++ will remain between requests. Generally use of
    globals in this way is a BAD IDEA, and you can spare yourself many headaches
    if do "use strict" perl programming which forces you to explicity declare
    globals like:

      use vars qw($counter);

    You can make all your Apache::ASP scripts strict by default by setting:

      PerlSetVar UseStrict 1

    Apache errors on the PerlHandler or PerlModule directives ?
    You get an error message like this:

     Invalid command 'PerlModule', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a 
     module not included in the server configuration.

    You do not have mod_perl correctly installed for Apache. The PerlHandler and
    PerlModule directives in Apache *.conf files are extensions 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;

    How can I keep search engine spiders from killing the session manager?
    If you want to disallow session creation for certain non web browser user
    agents, like search engine spiders, you can use a mod_perl PerlInitHandler
    like this to set configuration variables at runtime:

     # put the following code into httpd.conf and stop/start apache server
     PerlInitHandler My::InitHandler

     <Perl>

      package My::InitHandler;
      use Apache;

      sub handler {
        my $r = shift; # get the Apache request object

        # if not a Mozilla User Agent, then disable sessions explicitly
        unless($r->headers_in('User-Agent') =~ /^Mozilla/) {
           $r->dir_config('AllowSessionState', 'Off');
        }

        return 200; # return OK mod_perl status code
      }

      1;

     </Perl>

    This will configure your environment before Apache::ASP executes and sees
    the configuration settings. You can use the mod_perl API in this way to
    configure Apache::ASP at runtime.

    Note that the Session Manager is very robust on its own, and denial of
    service attacks of the types that spiders and other web bots normally
    execute are not likely to affect the Session Manager significantly.

    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
    VBScript or JScript supported?
    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. Sun has such a solution. Of course on Windows NT and Windows 2000,
    you get VBScript for free with IIS.

      Sun ONE Active Server Pages (formerly Sun Chili!Soft ASP)
      http://www.chilisoft.com

    How is database connectivity handled?
    Database connectivity is handled through perl's DBI & DBD interfaces. In the
    UNIX world, it seems most databases have cross platform support in perl. You
    can find the book on DBI programming at
    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perldbi/

    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.

  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 10 hits/second to 50+
    hits/second just with the right configuration.

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

  Online Resources
    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/

    Written in late 1999 this article provides an early look at how to tune your
    Apache::ASP web site. It has since been updated to remain current with
    Apache::ASP v2.29+

      Apache::ASP Site Tuning
      http://www.chamas.com/asp/articles/perlmonth3_tune.html

  Tuning & Benchmarking
    When performance tuning, it is important to have a tool to measure the
    impact of your tuning change by change. The program ab, or Apache Bench,
    provides this functionality well, and is freely included in the apache
    distribution.

    Because performance tuning can be a neverending affair, it is a good idea to
    establish a threshold where performance is "good enough", that once reached,
    tuning stops.

  $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 a RAM disk 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. Linux tends to do a good
    job caching its file systems, so pick a StateDir for ease of system
    administration.

    On Win32 systems, where mod_perl requests are serialized, you can freely use
    SessionSerialize to make your $Session requests faster, and you can achieve
    similar performance benefits for $Application if you call
    $Application->Lock() in your global.asa's Script_OnStart.

  Low MaxClients
    Set your MaxClients low, such that if you have that many httpd servers
    running, which will happen on busy site, your system will not start swapping
    to disk because of excessive RAM usage. Typical settings are less than 100
    even with 1 gig RAM! To handle more client connections, look into a dual
    server, mod_proxy front end.

  High MaxRequestsPerChild
    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 50 - 500 is probably pretty good. You do not want
    to set this too high though or you will risk having your web processes use
    too much RAM. One may use Apache::SizeLimit or Apache::GTopLimit to
    optimally tune MaxRequestsPerChild at runtime.

  Precompile Modules
    For those modules that your Apache::ASP application uses, make sure that
    they are loaded in your sites startup.pl file, or loaded with PerlModule in
    your httpd.conf, so that your modules are compiled pre-fork in the parent
    httpd.

  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 a PII300
    Solaris x86, 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 ALL child httpd servers, so total savings would be
    50Kx28x20(MaxClients)=28M!

    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 argument. 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 may want set that affect
    compilation. These options include: Debug, Global, GlobalPackage,
    DynamicIncludes, IncludesDir, InodeNames, PodComments, StatINC,
    StatINCMatch, UseStrict, XMLSubsPerlArgs, XMLSubsMatch, and XMLSubsStrict.
    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(
            '/usr/local/proj/site', "(asp|htm)\$", 
            'Global' => '/proj/perllib',
            'Debug' => -3, # see system 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,         
            'StatINCMatch' => 'My',
            'UseStrict' => 1,
            'XMLSubsMatch' => 'my:\w+',
            'XMLSubsStrict' => 0 || 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, depending on the number of modules your system loads in
    all, as each module needs to be checked for changes on a per request basis.

  Turn off Debugging
    Turn off system debugging by setting Debug to 0-3. Having the system debug
    config option on slows things down immensely, but can be useful when
    troubleshooting your application. System level debugging is settings -3
    through -1, where user level debugging is 1 to 3. User level debugging is
    much more light weight depending on how many $Reponse->Debug() statements
    you use in your program, and you may want to leave it on.

  Memory Sparing, NoCache
    If you have a lot (1000's+) 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 RAM per cached script.
    These numbers are very rough and will largely depend on the size of your
    scripts and includes.

  Resource Limits
    Make sure your web processes do not use too many resources like CPU or RAM
    with the handy Apache::Resource module. Such a config might look like:

     PerlModule Apache::Resource
     PerlSetEnv PERL_RLIMIT_CPU  1000
     PerlSetEnv PERL_RLIMIT_DATA 60:60

    If ever a web process should begin to take more than 60M ram or use more
    than 1000 CPU seconds, it will be killed by the OS this way. You only want
    to use this configuration to protect against runaway processes and web
    program errors, not for terminating a normally functioning system, so set
    these limits HIGH!

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

NOTES
    Many thanks to those who helped me make this module a reality. With Apache +
    ASP + Perl, web development could not be better!

    Special thanks go to my father Kevin & wife Lina for their love and support
    through it all, and without whom none of it would have been possible.

    Other honorable mentions include:

     !! Doug MacEachern, for moral support and of course mod_perl
     :) Helmut Zeilinger, Skylos, John Drago, and Warren Young for their help in the community
     :) Randy Kobes, for the win32 binaries, and for always being the epitome of helpfulness
     :) Francesco Pasqualini, for bug fixes with stand alone CGI mode on Win32
     :) Szymon Juraszczyk, for better ContentType handling for settings like Clean.
     :) Oleg Kobyakovskiy, for identifying the double Session_OnEnd cleanup bug.
     :) Peter Galbavy, for reporting numerous bugs and maintaining the OpenBSD port.
     :) Richard Curtis, for reporting and working through interesting module 
        loading issues under mod_perl2 & apache2, and pushing on the file upload API.
     :) Rune Henssel, for catching a major bug shortly after 2.47 release,
        and going to great lengths to get me reproducing the bug quickly.
     :) Broc, for keeping things filter aware, which broke in 2.45,
        & much help on the list.
     :) Manabu Higashida, for fixes to work under perl 5.8.0
     :) Slaven Rezic, for suggestions on smoother CPAN installation
     :) Mitsunobu Ozato, for working on a japanese translation of the site & docs.
     :) Eamon Daly for persistence in resolving a MailErrors bug.
     :) Gert, for help on the mailing list, and pushing the limits of use on Win32 
        in addition to XSLT.
     :) Maurice Aubrey, for one of the early fixes to the long file name problem.
     :) Tom Lancaster, for pushing the $Server->Mail API and general API discussion.
     :) Ross Thomas, for pushing into areas so far unexplored.
     :) Harald Kreuzer, for bug discovery & subsequent testing in the 2.25 era.
     :) Michael Buschauer for his extreme work with XSLT.
     :) Dariusz Pietrzak for a nice parser optimization.
     :) Ime Smits, for his inode patch facilitating cross site code reuse, and
        some nice performance enhancements adding another 1-2% speed.
     :) Michael Davis, for easier CPAN installation.
     :) Brian Wheeler, for keeping up with the Apache::Filter times,
        and pulling off filtering ASP->AxKit.
     :) Ged Haywood, for his great help on the list & professionally.
     :) Vee McMillen, for OSS patience & understanding.
     :) Craig Samuel, at LRN, for his faith in open source for his LCEC.
     :) Geert Josten, for his wonderful work on XML::XSLT
     :) Gerald Richter, for his Embperl, collaboration and competition!
     :) Stas Bekman, for his beloved guide, and keeping us all worldly.
     :) Matt Sergeant, again, for ever the excellent XML critique.
     :) Remi Fasol + Serge Sozonoff who inspired cookieless sessions.
     :) Matt Arnold, for the excellent graphics !
     :) Adi, who thought to have full admin control over sessions
     :) Dmitry Beransky, for sharable web application includes, ASP on the big.
     :) Russell Weiss again, for finding the internal session garbage collection 
        behaving badly with DB_File sensitive i/o flushing requirements.
     :) Tony Merc Mobily, inspiring tweaks to compile scripts 10 times faster
     :) Paul Linder, who is Mr. Clean... not just the code, its faster too !
        Boy was that just the beginning.  Work with him later facilitated better
        session management and XMLSubsMatch custom tag technology.
     :) Russell Weiss, for being every so "strict" about his code.
     :) Bill McKinnon, who understands the finer points of running a web site.
     :) Richard Rossi, for his need for speed & boldly testing dynamic includes.
     :) Greg Stark, for endless enthusiasm, pushing the module to its limits.
     :) Marc Spencer, who brainstormed dynamic includes.
     :) Doug Silver, for finding most of the bugs.
     :) Darren Gibbons, the biggest cookie-monster I have ever known.
     :) Ken Williams, for great teamwork bringing full SSI to the table
     :) Matt Sergeant, for his great tutorial on PerlScript and love of ASP
     :) Jeff Groves, who put a STOP to user stop button woes
     :) Alan Sparks, for knowing when size is more important than speed
     :) Lincoln Stein, for his blessed CGI.pm module
     :) Michael Rothwell, for his love of Session hacking
     :) Francesco Pasqualini, for bringing ASP to CGI
     :) Bryan Murphy, for being a PerlScript wiz
     :) Lupe Christoph, for his immaculate and stubborn testing skills
     :) Ryan Whelan, for boldly testing on Unix in the early infancy of ASP

SUPPORT
  COMMUNITY
    Mailing List Archives
    Try the Apache::ASP mailing list archive first when working through an issue
    as others may have had the same question as you, then try the mod_perl list
    archives since often problems working with Apache::ASP are really mod_perl
    ones.

    The Apache::ASP mailing list archives are located at:

     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apache-asp/
     http://www.mail-archive.com/asp%40perl.apache.org/

    The mod_perl mailing list archives are located at:

     http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/modperl
     http://www.egroups.com/group/modperl/

    Mailing List
    Please subscribe to the Apache::ASP mailing list by sending an email to
    asp-subscribe[at]perl.apache.org and send your questions or comments to the
    list after your subscription is confirmed.

    To unsubscribe from the Apache::ASP mailing list, just send an email to
    asp-unsubscribe[at]perl.apache.org

    If you think this is a mod_perl specific issue, you can send your question
    to modperl[at]apache.org

    Donations
    Apache::ASP is freely distributed under the terms of the GPL license ( see
    the LICENSE section ). If you would like to donate time to the project,
    please get involved on the Apache::ASP Mailing List, and submit ideas, bug
    fixes and patches for the core system, and perhaps most importantly to
    simply support others in learning the ins and outs of the software.

  COMMERCIAL
    If you would like commercial support for Apache::ASP, please check out any
    of the following listed companies. Note that this is not an endorsement, and
    if you would like your company listed here, please email asp-dev [at]
    chamas.com with your information.

    AlterCom
    We use, host and support mod_perl. We would love to be able to help anyone
    with their mod_perl Apache::ASP needs. Our mod_perl hosting is $24.95 mo.

      http://altercom.com/home.html

    The Cyberchute Connection
    Our hosting services support Apache:ASP along with Mod_Perl, PHP and MySQL.

      http://www.Cyberchute.com

    GrokThis.net
    Web hosting provider. Specializing in mod_perl and mod_python hosting, we
    allow users to edit their own Apache configuration files and run their own
    Apache servers.

      http://grokthis.net

    OmniTI
    OmniTI supports Apache and mod_perl (including Apache::ASP) and offers
    competitive pricing for both hourly and project-based jobs. OmniTI has
    extensive experience managing and maintaining both large and small projects.
    Our services range from short-term consulting to project-based development,
    and include ongoing maintenance and hosting.

      http://www.omniti.com

    TUX IT AG
    Main business is implementing and maintaining infrastructure for big
    websites and portals, as well as developing web applications for our
    customers (Apache, Apache::ASP, PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc.)

    The prices for our service are about 900 EUR per day which is negotiable
    (for longer projects, etc.).

      http://www.tuxit.de

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 link to asp-dev [at] chamas.com

    For a list of testimonials of those using Apache::ASP, please see the
    TESTIMONIALS section.

            Zapisy - Testy
            http://www.ch.pwr.wroc.pl/~bruno/testy/

            SalesJobs.com
            http://www.salesjobs.com

            FreeLotto
            http://www.freelotto.com

            Hungarian TOP1000
            http://www.hungariantop1000.com

            Hungarian Registry
            http://www.hunreg.com

            Kepeslap.com
            http://www.kepeslap.com

            yourpostcardsite.com
            http://www.yourpostcardsite.com

            WebTime
            http://webtime-project.net

            Meet-O-Matic
            http://meetomatic.com/about.asp

            Apache Hello World Benchmarks
            http://chamas.com/bench/

            AlterCom, Advanced Web Hosting
            http://altercom.com/

            AmericanGamers.com
            http://www.AmericanGamers.com/

            ESSTECwebservices
            http://www.esstec.be/

            SQLRef
            http://comclub.dyndns.org:8081/sqlref/

            Bouygues Telecom Enterprises
            http://www.b2bouygtel.com

            Alumni.NET
            http://www.alumni.net

            Anime Wallpapers dot com
            http://www.animewallpapers.com/

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

            Cine.gr
            http://www.cine.gr

            Condo-Mart Web Service
            http://www.condo-mart.com 

            Discountclick.com
            http://www.discountclick.com/

            HCST
            http://www.hcst.net

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

            Integra
            http://www.integra.ru/

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

            Money FM
            http://www.moneyfm.gr

            Motorsport.com
            http://www.motorsport.com

            MLS of Greater Cincinnati
            http://www.cincymls.com

            NodeWorks Link Checker
            http://www.nodeworks.com

            OnTheWeb Services
            http://www.ontheweb.nu

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

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

            Samara.RU
            http://portal.samara.ru/

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

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

TESTIMONIALS
    Here are testimonials from those using Apache::ASP. If you use this software
    and would like to show your support please send your testimonial to
    Apache::ASP mailing list at asp[at]perl.apache.org and indicate that we can
    post it to the web site.

    For a list of sites using Apache::ASP, please see the SITES USING section.

    Red Hat
    We're using Apache::ASP on www.redhat.com. We find Apache::ASP very easy to
    use, and it's quick for new developers to get up to speed with it, given
    that many people have already been exposed to the ASP object model that
    Apache::ASP is based on.

    The documentation is comprehensive and easy to understand, and the community
    and maintainer have been very helpful whenever we've had questions.

      -- Tom Lancaster, Red Hat

    D. L. Fox
    I had programmed in Perl for some time ... but, since I also knew VB, I had
    switched to VB in IIS-ASP for web stuff because of its ease of use in
    embedding code with HTML ... When I discovered Apache-ASP, it was like a
    dream come true. I would much rather code in Perl than any other language.
    Thanks for such a fine product!

    HOSTING 321, LLC.
    After discontinuing Windows-based hosting due to the high cost of software,
    our clients are thrilled with Apache::ASP and they swear ASP it's faster
    than before. Installation was a snap on our 25-server web farm with a small
    shell script and everything is running perfectly! The documentation is very
    comprehensive and everyone has been very helpful during this migration.

    Thank you!

     -- Richard Ward, HOSTING 321, LLC.

    Concept Online Ltd.
    I would like to say that your ASP module rocks :-) We have practically
    stopped developing in anything else about half a year ago, and are now using
    Apache::ASP extensively. I just love Perl, and whereever we are not "forced"
    to use JSP, we chose ASP. It is fast, reliable, versatile, documented in a
    way that is the best for professionals - so thank you for writting and
    maintaining it!

      -- Csongor Fagyal, Concept Online Ltd.

    WebTime
    As we have seen with WebTime, Apache::ASP is not only good for the
    development of website, but also for the development of webtools. Since I
    first discoverd it, I made it a must-have in my society by taking
    traditional PHP users to the world of perl afficionados.

    Having the possibility to use Apache::ASP with mod_perl or mod_cgi make it
    constraintless to use because of CGI's universality and perl's portability.

      -- Grégoire Lejeune

    David Kulp
    First, I just want to say that I am very very impressed with Apache::ASP. I
    just want to gush with praise after looking at many other implementations of
    perl embedded code and being very underwhelmed. This is so damn slick and
    clean. Kudos! ...

    ... I'm very pleased how quickly I've been able to mock up the application.
    I've been writing Perl CGI off and on since 1993(!) and I can tell you that
    Apache::ASP is a pleasure. (Last year I tried Zope and just about threw my
    computer out the window.)

      -- David Kulp

    MFM Commmunication Software, Inc.
    Working in a team environment where you have HTML coders and perl coders,
    Apache::ASP makes it easy for the HTML folks to change the look of the page
    without knowing perl. Using Apache::ASP (instead of another embedded perl
    solution) allows the HTML jockeys to use a variety of HTML tools that
    understand ASP, which reduces the amount of code they break when editing the
    HTML. Using Apache::ASP instead of M$ ASP allows us to use perl (far
    superior to VBScript) and Apache (far superior to IIS).

    We've been very pleased with Apache::ASP and its support.

    Planet of Music
    Apache::ASP has been a great tool. Just a little background.... the whole
    site had been in cgi flat files when I started here. I was looking for a
    technology that would allow me to write the objects and NEVER invoke
    CGI.pm... I found it and hopefuly I will be able to implement this every
    site I go to.

    When I got here there was a huge argument about needing a game engine and I
    belive this has been the key... Games are approx. 10 time faster than
    before. The games don't break anylonger. All in all a great tool for
    advancement.

      -- JC Fant IV

    Cine.gr
    ...we ported our biggest yet ASP site from IIS (well, actually rewrote),
    Cine.gr and it is a killer site. In some cases, the whole thing got almost
    25 (no typo) times faster... None of this would ever be possible without
    Apache::ASP (I do not ever want to write ``print "<HTML>\n";'' again).

RESOURCES
    Here are some important resources listed related to the use of Apache::ASP
    for publishing web applications. If you have any more to suggest, please
    email the Apache::ASP list at asp[at]perl.apache.org

  Articles
           Apache::ASP Introduction ( #1 in 3 part series )
           http://www.apache-asp.org/articles/perlmonth1_intro.html

           Apache::ASP Site Building ( #2 in 3 part series )
           http://www.apache-asp.org/articles/perlmonth2_build.html

           Apache::ASP Site Tuning ( #3 in 3 part series )
           http://www.apache-asp.org/articles/perlmonth3_tune.html

           Embedded Perl ( part of a series on Perl )
           http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/Languages/Perl/PerlfortheWeb/index15.html

  Benchmarking
           Apache Hello World Benchmarks
           http://chamas.com/bench/

  Books
           mod_perl "Eagle" Book
           http://www.modperl.com

           mod_perl Developer's Cookbook
           http://www.modperlcookbook.org

           Programming the Perl DBI
           http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perldbi/

  Presentations
           Apache::ASP Tutorial, 2000 Open Source Convention ( PowerPoint )
           http://www.chamas.com/asp/OSS_convention_2000.pps

           Advanced Apache::ASP Tutorial, 2001 Open Source Convention ( Zipped PDF )
           http://www.chamas.com/asp/OSS_convention_2001.zip

           Advanced Apache::ASP Tutorial, 2001 Open Source Convention ( PDF )
           http://www.chamas.com/asp/OSS_convention_2001.pdf

  Reference Cards
            Apache & mod_perl Reference Cards
            http://www.refcards.com/

  Web Sites
            mod_perl Apache web module
            http://perl.apache.org

            mod_perl Guide
            http://perl.apache.org/guide/

            Perl Programming Language
            http://www.perl.com

            Apache Web Server
            http://www.apache.org
 
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
     + Database storage of $Session & $Application, so web clusters 
       may scale better than the current NFS/CIFS StateDir implementation
       allows, maybe via Apache::Session.
     + Sample Apache::ASP applications beyond ./site/eg
     + More caching options like $Server->Cache for user cache
       and $Response->Cache for page caching
     + Caching guide

  MAY BE DONE
     + VBScript, ECMAScript or JavaScript interpreters
     + Dumping state of Apache::ASP during an error, and being
       able to go through it with the perl debugger.

CHANGES
    Apache::ASP has been in development since 1998, and was production ready
    since its .02 release. Releases are always used in a production setting
    before being made publically available.

    In July 2000, the version numbers of releases went from .19 to 1.9 which is
    more relevant to software development outside the perl community. Where a
    .10 perl module usually means first production ready release, this would be
    the equivalent of a 1.0 release for other kinds of software.

     + = improvement   - = bug fix    (d) = documentations

    $VERSION = 2.62; $DATE="2011/08/16"

     - Fixed 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' for AJAX POSTs post
       Firefox 3.x

     + First sourceforge.net hosted version

     + Incremented version number to actually match SVN branch tag

     + Switched to Big-endian date format in the documentation.
       Less chance of misunderstandings

    $VERSION = 2.61; $DATE="05/24/2008"

     - updated for more recent mod_perl 2 environment to trigger correct loading of modules

     + loads modules in a backwards compatible way for older versions of mod_perl 1.99_07 to 1.99_09

     + license changes from GPL to Perl Artistic License

     Please see README for changes for past versions.

    $VERSION = 2.59; $DATE="05/23/2005"
     + added "use bytes" to Response object to calculate Content-Length
       correctly for UTF8 data, which should require therefore at least
       perl version 5.6 installed

     + updated to work with latest mod_perl 2.0 module naming convention,
       thanks to Randy Kobes for patch

     + examples now exclude usage of Apache::Filter & Apache::SSI under mod_perl 2.0

    $VERSION = 2.57; $DATE="01/29/2004"
     - $Server->Transfer will update $0 correctly

     - return 0 for mod_perl handler to work with latest mod_perl 2 release
       when we were returning 200 ( HTTP_OK ) before

     - fixed bug in $Server->URL when called like $Server->URL($url)
       without parameters.  Its not clear which perl versions this bug 
       affected.

    $VERSION = 2.55; $DATE="08/09/2003"
     - Bug fixes for running on standalone CGI mode on Win32 submitted
       by Francesco Pasqualini

     + Added Apache::ASP::Request::BINMODE for binmode() being
       called on STDIN after STDIN is tied to $Request object

     + New RequestBinaryRead configuration created, may be turned off
       to prevent $Request object from reading POST data

     ++ mod_perl 2 optmizations, there was a large code impact on this,
       as much code was restructured to reduce the differences between
       mod_perl 1 and mod_perl 2, most importantly, Apache::compat is
       no longer used

     + preloaded CGI for file uploads in the mod_perl environment

     - When XSLT config is set, $Response->Redirect() should work now
       Thanks to Marcus Zoller for pointing problem out

     + Added CookieDomain setting, documented, and added test to cover 
       it in t/cookies.t . Setting suggested by Uwe Riehm, who nicely 
       submitted some code for this.

    $VERSION = 2.53; $DATE="04/10/2003"
     + XMLSubs tags with "-" in them will have "-" replaced with "_" or underscore, so a
       tag like <my:render-table /> will be translated to &my::render_table() ... tags with
       - in them are common in extended XML syntaxes, but perl subs cannot have - in them only.

     + Clean setting now works on output when $Response->{ContentType} begins with text/html;
       like "text/html; charset=iso-8859-2" ... before Clean would only work on output marked
       with ContentType text/html.  Thanks to Szymon Juraszczyk for recommending fix.

     --Fixed a bug which would cause Session_OnEnd to be called twice on sessions in a certain case,
       particularly when an old expired session gets reused by and web browser... this bug was
       a result of a incomplete session cleanup method in this case.  Thanks to Oleg Kobyakovskiy 
       for reporting this bug.  Added test in t/session_events.t to cover this problem going forward.

     - Compile errors from Apache::ASP->Loader() were not being reported.  They will
       be reported again now.  Thanks to Thanos Chatziathanassiou for discovering and
       documenting this bug.  Added test in t/load.t to cover this problem going forward.

     + use of chr(hex($1)) to decode URI encoded parameters instead of pack("c",hex($1))
       faster & more correct, thanks to Nikolay Melekhin for pointing out this need.

     (d) Added old perlmonth.com articles to ./site/articles in distribution
       and linked to them from the docs RESOURCES section

     (d) Updated documention for the $Application->SessionCount API

     + Scripts with named subroutines, which is warned against in the style guide,
       will not be cached to help prevent my closure problems that often
       hurt new developers working in mod_perl environments.  The downside
       is that these script will have a performance penalty having to be
       recompiled each invocation, but this will kill many closure caching 
       bugs that are hard to detect.

     - $Request->FileUpload('upload_file', 'BrowserFile') would return
       a glob before that would be the file name in scalar form.  However
       this would be interpreted as a reference incorrectly.  The fix
       is to make sure this is always a scalar by stringifying 
       this data internally.  Thanks to Richard Curtis for pointing
       out this bug.

    $VERSION = 2.51; $DATE="02/10/2003"
     + added t/session_query_parse.t test to cover use of SessionQueryParse
       and $Server->URL APIs

     - Fixed duplicate "&" bug associated with using $Server->URL 
       and SessionQueryParse together

     + Patch to allow $Server->URL() to be called multiple times on the same URL
       as in $Server->URL($Server->URL($url, \%params), \%more_params)

     (d) Added new testimonials & sites & created a separate testimonials page.

     - SessionQueryParse will now add to &amp; to the query strings
       embedded in the HTML, instead of & for proper HTML generation.
       Thanks to Peter Galbavy for pointing out and Thanos Chatziathanassiou
       for suggesting the fix.

     - $Response->{ContentType} set to text/html for developer error reporting,
       in case this was set to something else before the error occured.
       Thanks to Philip Mak for reporting.

     - Couple of minor bug fixes under PerlWarn use, thanks Peter Galbavy
       for reporting.

     + Added automatic load of "use Apache2" for compat with mod_perl2 
       request objects when Apache::ASP is loaded via "PerlModule Apache::ASP"
       Thanks to Richard Curtis for reporting bug & subsequent testing.

     - When GlobalPackage config changes, but global.asa has not, global.asa
       will be recompiled anyway to update the GlobalPackage correctly.
       Changing GlobalPackage before would cause errors if global.asa was
       already compiled.

     ++ For ANY PerlSetVar type config, OFF/Off/off will be assumed 
        to have value of 0 for that setting.  Before, only a couple settings
        had this semantics, but they all do now for consistency.

     - Fix for InodeNames config on OpenBSD, or any OS that might have
       a device # of 0 for the file being stat()'d, thanks to Peter Galbavy
       for bug report.

     ++ Total XSLT speedups, 5-10% on large XSLT, 10-15% on small XSLT

     + bypass meta data check like expires for XSLT Cache() API use
       because XSLT tranformations don't expire, saves hit to cache dbm
       for meta data

     + use of direct Apache::ASP::State methods like FETCH/STORE
       in Cache() layer so we don't have to go through slower tied interface.
       This will speed up XSLT & and include output caching mostly.

     + minor optimizations for speed & memory usage

    $VERSION = 2.49; $DATE="11/10/2002"
     -- bug introduced in 2.47 cached script compilations for executing
        scripts ( not includes ) of the same name in different directories
        for the same Global/GlobalPackage config for an application.
        Fix was to remove optimization that caused problem, and
        created test case t/same_name.t to cover bug.

    $VERSION = 2.47; $DATE="11/06/2002"
     ++ Runtime speed enhancements for 15-20% improvement including:
       + INTERNAL API ReadFile() now returns scalar ref as memory optimization
       + cache InodeNames config setting in ASP object now for common lookups
       + removed CompileChecksum() INTERNAL API, since it was an unnecesary
         method decomposition along a common code path
       + removed IsChanged() INTERNAL API since compiling of scripts
         is now handled by CompileInclude() which does this functionality already
       + removed unnecessary decomp of IncludesChanged() INTERNAL API, which was along
         critical code path
       + do not call INTERNAL SearchDirs() API when compiling base script
         since we have already validated its path earlier
       + Use stat(_) type shortcut for stat() & -X calls where possible
       + Moved @INC initilization up to handler() & consolidated with $INCDir lib
       + removed useless Apache::ASP::Collection::DESTROY
       + removed useless Apache::ASP::Server::DESTROY
       + removed useless Apache::ASP::GlobalASA::DESTROY
       + removed useless Apache::ASP::Response::DESTROY

     - Default path for $Response->{Cookies} was from CookiePath
       config, but this was incorrect as CookiePath config is only
       for $Session cookie, so now path for $Response->{Cookies}
       defaults to /

     - Fixed bug where global.asa events would get undefined with
       StatINC and GlobalPackage set when the GlobalPackage library
       changed & get reloaded.

     (d) Documented long time config NoCache.

     -- Fixed use with Apache::Filter, capable as both source
        and destination filter.  Added ./site/eg/filter.filter example
        to demonstrate these abilities.

     + Use $r->err_headers_out->add Apache::Table API for cookies 
       now instead of $r->cgi_header_out.  Added t/cookies.t test to 
       cover new code path as well as general $Response->Cookies API.
       Also make cookies headers sorted by cookie and dictionary key 
       while building headers for repeatable behavior, this latter was 
       to facilitate testing.

     - fixed $Server->Mail error_log output when failing to connect
       to SMTP server.

     + added tests to cover UniquePackages & NoCache configs since this
       config logic was updated

     + made deprecated warnings for use of certain $Response->Member
       calls more loudly write to error_log, so I can remove the AUTOLOAD
       for Response one day

     - Probably fixed behavior in CgiHeaders, at least under perl 5.8.0, and
       added t/cgi_headers.t to cover this config.

     + removed $Apache::ASP::CompressGzip setting ability, used to possibly
       set CompressGzip in the module before, not documented anyway

     + removed $Apache::ASP::Filter setting ability to set Filter globally, 
       not documented anyway

     + removed old work around for setting ServerStarting to 0
       at runtime, which was bad for Apache::DBI on win32 a long
       time ago:

        $Apache::ServerStarting and $Apache::ServerStarting = 0;

       If this code is still needed in Apache::ASP->handler() let
       me know.

     + check to make sure data in internal database is a HASH ref
       before using it for session garbage collection.  This is to
       help prevent against internal database corruption in a 
       network share that does not support flock() file locking.

     + For new XMLSubs ASP type <%= %> argument interpolation
       activated with XMLSubsPerlArgs 0, data references can now
       be passed in addition to SCALAR/string references, so one
       can pass an object reference like so:

         <my:tag value="<%= $Object %>" />

       This will only work as long as the variable interpolation <%= %>
       are flushed against the containing " " or ' ', or else the object
       reference will be stringified when it is concatenated with 
       the rest of the data.

       Testing for this feature was added to ./t/xmlsubs_aspargs.t

       This feature is still experimental, and its interface may change.
       However it is slated for the 3.0 release as default method,
       so feedback is appreciated.

     + For new XMLSubs ASP type <%= %> argument interpolation
       activated with XMLSubsPerlArgs 0, <% %> will no longer work,
       just <%= %>, as in 

         <my:tag value="some value <%= $value %> more data" />

       This feature is still experimental, and its interface may change.
       However it is slated for the 3.0 release as default method,
       so feedback is appreciated.

    $VERSION = 2.45; $DATE="10/13/2002"
     ++New XMLSubsPerlArgs config, default 1, indicates how 
      XMLSubs arguments have always been parsed.  If set to 0,
      will enable new XMLSubs args that are more ASP like with
      <%= %> for dynamic interpolation, such as:

        <my:xmlsub arg="<%= $data %>" arg2="text <%= $data2 %>" />
 
      Settings XMLSubsPerlArgs to 0 is experimental for now, but
      will become the default by Apache::ASP version 3.0

     ++Optimization for static HTML/XML files that are served up 
      via Apache::ASP so that they are not compiled into perl subroutines
      first.  This makes especially native XSLT both faster & take
      less memory to serve, before XSL & XML files being transformed
      by XSLT would both be compiled as normal ASP script first, so 
      now this will happen if they really are ASP scripts with embedded
      <% %> code blocks & XMLSubs being executed.

     +Consolidate some config data for Apache::ASP->Loader to use
      globals in @Apache::ASP::CompileChecksumKeys to know which 
      config data is important for precompiling ASP scripts.

     +Further streamlined code compilation.  Now both base
      scripts and includes use the internal CompileInclude() API
      to generate code.

     -Fixed runtime HTML error output when Debug is set to -2/2,
      so that script correctly again gets rendered in final perl form.
      Added compile time error output to ./site/eg/syntax_error.htm
      when a special link is clicked for a quick visual test.

     -Cleaned up some bad coding practices in ./site/eg/global.asa
      associated changes in other example files.  Comment example
      global.asa some for the first time reader

     -DemoASP.pm examples module needed "use strict" fix, thanks
      to Allan Vest for bug report

     --$rv = $Response->Include({ File => ..., Cache => 1});
      now works to get the first returned value fetched from
      the cache.  Before, because a list was always returned,
      $rv would have been equal to the number of items returned,
      even if the return value list has just one element.

     (d) added site/robots.txt file with just a comment for
         search engine indexing

     -fixed ./site/eg/binary_write.htm to not use 
      $Response->{ContentLength} because it does not exist.
      Fixed it to use $Response->AddHeader now instead  

    $VERSION = 2.41; $DATE="09/29/2002"
     -Removed CVS Revision tag from Apache::ASP::Date, which 
      was causing bad revision numbers in CPAN after CVS integration
      of Apache::ASP

     +removed cgi/asp link to ../asp-perl from distribution.  This
      link was for the deprecated asp script which is now asp-perl

    $VERSION = 2.39; $DATE="09/10/2002"
     -Turn off $^W explicitly before reloading global.asa.  Reloading
      global.asa when $^W is set will trigger subroutine redefinition
      warnings.  Reloading global.asa should occur without any problems
      under normal usage of the system, thus this work around.

      This fix is important to UseStrict functionality because warnings
      automatically become thrown as die() errors with UseStrict enabled,
      so we have to disable normal soft warnings here.

     -$Response->Include() runtime errors now throw a die() that
      can be trapped.  This was old functionality that has been restored.
      Other compile time errors should still trigger a hard error
      like script compilation, global.asa, or $Response->Include()
      without an eval()

     +Some better error handling with Debug 3 or -3 set, cleaned
      up developer errors messages somewhat.

    $VERSION = 2.37; $DATE="07/03/2002"
     -Fixed the testing directory structures for t/long_names.t
      so that tar software like Archive::Tar & Solaris tar that
      have problems with long file names will still be able 
      to untar distribution successfully.  Now t/long_names.t
      generates its testing directory structures at runtime.

     -Fixes for "make test" to work under perl 5.8.0 RC2, 
      courtesy of Manabu Higashida

     +SessionQueryForce setting created for disabling use of cookies
      for $Session session-id passing, rather requiring use of SessionQuery*
      functionality for session-id passing via URL query string.

      By default, even when SessionQuery* options are used, cookies will
      be used if available with SessionQuery* functionality acting only
      as a backup, so this makes it so that cookies will never be used.

     +Escape ' with HTMLEncode() to &#39;

     -Trying to fix t/server_mail.t to work better for platforms
      that it should skip testing on.  Updated t/server.t test case.

     +Remove exit() from Makefile.PL so CPAN.pm's automatic
      follow prereq mechanism works correctly.  Thanks to Slaven Rezic
      for pointing this out.

     +Added Apache::compat loading in mod_perl environment for better
      mod_perl 2.0 support.

    $VERSION = 2.35; $DATE="05/30/2002"
     +Destroy better $Server & $Response objects so that my 
      closure references to these to not attempt to work in the future 
      against invalid internal data. There was enough data left in these 
      old objects to make debugging the my closure problem confusing, where 
      it looked like the ASP object state became invalid.

     +Added system debug diagnostics to inspect StateManager group cleanup

     (d) Documentation update about flock() work around for 
      Win95/Win98/WinMe systems, confirmed by Rex Arul

     (d) Documentation/site build bug found by Mitsunobu Ozato, 
      where <% %> not being escaped correctly with $Server->HTMLEncode().
      New japanese documentation project started by him 
      at http://sourceforge.jp/projects/apache-asp-jp/ 

     -InitPackageGlobals() called after new Apache::ASP object created so 
      core system templates can be compiled even when there was a runtime
      compilation error of user templates.  Bug fix needed pointed out by
      Eamon Daly

    $VERSION = 2.33; $DATE="04/29/2002"
     - fixed up t/server_mail.t test to skip if a sendmail server
       is not available on localhost.  We only want the test to run
       if there is a server to test against.

     + removed cgi/asp script, just a symlink now to the ./asp-perl script
       which in this way deprecates it.  I had it hard linked, but the 
       distribution did not untar very well on win32 platform.

     + Reordered the modules in Bundle::Apache::ASP for a cleaner install.

     - Fixed bug where XMLSubs where removing <?xml version ... ?> tag
       when it was needed in XSLT mode.

     + $Server->Mail({ CC => '...', BCC => '...' }), now works to send
       CC & BCC headers/recipients.

     + Removed $Apache::ASP::Register definition which defined the current
       executing Apache::ASP object.  Only one part of the application was
       using it, and this has been fixed.  This would have been an unsafe
       use of globals for a threaded environment.

     + Decreased latency when doing Application_OnStart, used to sleep(1) 
       for CleanupMaster sync, but this is not necessary for Application_OnStart 
       scenario

     + Restructure code / core templates for MailErrorsTo funcationality.  
       Wrote test mail_error.t to cover this.  $ENV{REMOTE_USER} will now 
       be displayed in the MailErrorsTo message when defined from 401 basic auth.

     + $Server->RegisterCleanup should be thread safe now, as it no longer relies
       on access to @Apache::ASP::Cleanup for storing the CODE ref stack.

     + test t/inode_names.t for InodeNames and other file tests covering case
       of long file names.

     - Fixed long file name sub identifier bug.  Added test t/long_names.t.

     + CacheDir may now be set independently of StateDir.  It used to default
       to StateDir if it was set.

     ++ Decomposition of modules like Apache::ASP::Session & Apache::ASP::Application
       out of ASP.pm file.  This should make the source more developer friendly.  

       This selective code compilation also speeds up CGI requests that do not 
       need to load unneeded modules like Apache::ASP::Session, by about 50%,
       so where CGI mode ran at about 2.1 hits/sec before, now for 
       light requests that do not load $Session & $Application, requests
       run at 3.4 hits/sec, this is on a dual PIII-450 linux 2.4.x

     - Caching like for XSLTCache now works in CGI mode.  
       This was a bug that it did not before.

     + $Server->File() API added, acts as a wrapper around 
       Apache->request->filename Added test in t/server.t

     ++  *** EXPERIMENTAL / ALPHA FEATURE NOTE BEGIN ***

       New $PERLLIB/Apache/ASP/Share/ directory created to 
       hold system & user contributed components, which will be found
       on the $Server->MapInclude() path, which helps $Response->Include
       search '.',Global,IncludesDir, and now Apache::ASP::Share for
       includes to load at runtime.  

       The syntax for loading a shared include is to prefix the file
       name with Share:: as in:

        $Response->TrapInclude('Share::CORE/MailError.inc');

       New test to cover this at t/share.t

       This feature is experimental.  The naming convention may change
       and the feature may disappear altogether, so only use if you
       are interesting in experimenting with this feature & will
       provide feedback about how it works.

       *** EXPERIMENTAL / ALPHA FEATURE NOTE END ***

     + asp-perl script now uses ./asp.conf instead of ./asp.config
       for runtime configuration via %Config defined there.  Update docs
       for running in standalone CGI mode

     + Make use of MANFEST.SKIP to not publish the dev/* files anymore.

     - Script_OnEnd guaranteed to run after $Response->End, but 
       it will not run if there was an error earlier in the request.

     + lots of new test cases covering behaviour of $Response->End
       and $Response->Redirect under various conditions like XMLSubs
       and SoftRedirect and global.asa Script_OnStart

     + asp-perl will be installed into the bin executables when
       Apache::ASP is installed.  asp-perl is the command line version
       of Apache::ASP that can also be used to run script in CGI mode.
       Test case covering asp-perl functionality.

     + asp CGI/command line script now called asp-perl.  I picked this 
       name because Apache::ASP often has the name asp-perl in distributions
       of the module.

     + Apache::ASP::CGI::Test class now subclass of Apache::ASP::CGI.  To facilitate
       this Apache::ASP::CGI::init() now called OO like Apache::ASP::CGI->init()
       Fixed up places where the old style was called.  New Test class allows
       a dummy Apache request object to be built which caches header & body output
       for later inspection instead of writing it to STDOUT.

     - $Response->Redirect() under SoftRedirect 1 will not first Clear() buffer

     - $Response->Redirect() in an XMLSubs will work now ... behavior
       of $Response->Flush() being turned off in an XMLSubs was interfering with this.

     + srand() init tracking done better, thanks for patch from Ime Smits

     + Added file/directory being used for precompilation in 
       Apache::ASP->Loader($file, ...) to output like:

        [Mon Feb 04 20:19:22 2002] [error] [asp] 4215 (re)compiled 22 scripts 
          of 22 loaded for $file

       This is so that when precompiling multiple web sites
       each with different directories, one can easier see the 
       compile output relevant to the Loader() command being run.

     + better decomp of Apache::ASP site build files at ./build/* files,
       which is good should anyone look at it for ideas.

     + improved test suite to error when unintended output results from
       t/*.t test scripts.

     - () now supported in XMLSubsMatch config, added xmlsubsmatch.t test...
       specifically a config like 

         PerlSetVar (aaa|bbb):\w+ 

       should now work.  Thanks for bug report from David Kulp.

     + Added an early srand() for better $ServerID creation

     + Work around for DSO problems where $r is not always correctly 
       defined in Apache::ASP::handler().  Thanks to Tom Lear for patch.

    $VERSION = 2.31; $DATE="01/22/2002";
     + $Server->MapInclude() API extension created to wrap up Apache::ASP::SearchDirs 
       functionality so one may do an conditional check for an include existence befor 
       executing $Response->Include().  Added API test to server.t

     + $Server->Transfer() now allows arguments like $Response->Include(), and now acts just
       as a wrapper for:

         $Response->Include($file, @args);
         $Response->End();

       added test case at t/server_transfer.t

     + Removed dependency of StatINC functionality on Apache::Symbol.  Apache::Symbol 
       is no longer required.  Added test of t/stat_inc.t for correct StatINC initialization
       for platforms where Devel::Symdump is present.

     + Better error message when $Request->Params has not been defined with RequestParams
       config & it gets used in script.  Added test case as t/request_params_none.t

     + Directories cannot now be included as scripts via $Response->Include(), added
       test case to t/include.t

     - No longer make $Response->Flush dependent on $Response->IsClientConnected() to 
       be true to write output to client.  There have been spurious errors reported
       about the new ( >= 2.25 ) IsClientConnected code, and this will limit the impact 
       of that functionality possibly not working still to those users explicitly using 
       that API.

     + $Response->AddHeader($header_name, $value) now will set $Response members
       for these headers: Content-Type, Cache-Control, Expires.  This is to avoid
       both the application & Apache::ASP sending out duplicate headers.  Added
       test cases for this to t/response.t

     + split up Bundle::Apache::ASP into that, and Bundle::Apache::ASP::Extra
       the former with just the required modules to run, and the latter 
       for extra functionality in Apache::ASP

     + new $Request->{Method} member to return $r->method of GET or POST that 
       client browser is requesting, added t/request.t sub test to cover this member.

    $VERSION = 2.29; $DATE="11/19/2001";
     +Added some extra help text to the ./cgi/asp --help message
      to clarify how to pass arguments to a script from the command line.

     +When using $Server->Mail() API, if Content-Type header is set,
      and MIME-Version is not, then a "MIME-Version: 1.0" header will be sent
      for the email.  This is correct according to RFC 1521 which specifies
      for the first time the Content-Type: header for email documents.
      Thanks to Philip Mak for pointing out this correct behavior.

     +Made dependent on MLDBM::Sync version .25 to pass the taint_check.t test

     +Improved server_mail.t test to work with mail servers were relaying is denied

     +Added <html><body> tags to MailErrorsTo email

     --Fixed SessionCount / Session_OnEnd bug, where these things were not
      working for $Sessions that never had anything written to them.
      This bug was introduced in 2.23/2.25 release.

      There was an optimization in 2.23/2.25 where a $Session that was never
      used does not write its state lock file & dbm files to disk, only if
      it gets written too like $Session->{MARK}++.  Tracking of these NULL $Sessions 
      then is handled solely in the internal database.  For $Session garbage 
      collection though which would fire Session_OnEnd events and update 
      SessionCount, the Apache::ASP::State->GroupMembers() function was just 
      looking for state files on disk ... now it looks in the internal database 
      too for SessionID records for garbage collection.

      Added a test at ./t/session_events.t for these things.

     +Some optimizations for $Session API use.

     +Added support for XSLT via XML::LibXSLT, patch courtesy of Michael Buschauer

     -Got rid of an warning when recompiling changing includes under perl 5.6.1...
      undef($code) method did not work for this perl version, rather undef(&$code) does.
      Stopped using using Apache::Symbol for this when available.

     -Make Apache::ASP script run under perl taint checking -T for perl 5.6.1...
      $code =~ tr///; does not work to untaint here, so much use the slower:
      $code =~ /^(.*)$/s; $code = $1; method to untaint.

     -Check for inline includes changing, included in a dynamic included
      loaded at runtime via $Response->Include().  Added test case for
      this at t/include_change.t.  If an inline include of a dynamic include
      changes, the dynamic include should get recompiled now.

     -Make OK to use again with PerlTaintCheck On, with MLDBM::Sync 2.25.
      Fixed in ASP.pm, t/global.asa, and created new t/taint_check.t test script

     +Load more modules when Apache::ASP is loaded so parent will share more
      with children httpd: 
       Apache::Symbol 
       Devel::Symdump 
       Config 
       lib 
       MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File

     +When FileUploadMax bytes is exceeded for a file upload, there will not
      be an odd error anymore resulting from $CGI::POST_MAX being triggered,
      instead the file upload input will simply be ignored via $CGI::DISABLE_UPLOADS.
      This gives the developer the opportunity to tell the user the the file upload
      was too big, as demonstrated by the ./site/eg/file_upload.asp example.

      To not let the web client POST a lot of data to your scripts as a form
      of a denial of service attack use the apache config LimitRequestBody for the 
      max limits.  You can think of PerlSetVar FileUploadMax as a soft limit, and 
      apache's LimitRequestBody as a hard limit.

     --Under certain circumstances with file upload, it seems that IsClientConnected() 
      would return an aborted client value from $r->connection->aborted, so
      the buffer output data would not be flushed to the client, and 
      the HTML page would return to the browser empty.  This would be under
      normal file upload use.  One work-around was to make sure to initialize
      the $Request object before $Response->IsClientConnected is called,
      then $r->connection->aborted returns the right value.
  
      This problem was probably introduced with IsClientConnected() code changes
      starting in the 2.25 release.

    $VERSION = 2.27; $DATE="10/31/2001";
     + Wrapped call to $r->connection->fileno in eval {} so to 
       preserve backwards compatibility with older mod_perl versions
       that do not have this method defined.  Thanks to Helmut Zeilinger
       for catching this.

     + removed ./dev directory from distribution, useless clutter

     + Removed dependency on HTTP::Date by taking code into
       Apache::ASP as Apache::ASP::Date.  This relieves
       the dependency of Apache::ASP on libwww LWP libraries.
       If you were using HTTP::Date functions before without loading
       "use HTTP::Date;" on your own, you will have to do this now.

     + Streamlined code execution.  Especially worked on 
       $Response->IsClientConnected which gets called during
       a normal request execution, and got rid of IO::Select
       dependency. Some function style calls instead of OO style 
       calls where private functions were being invokes that one 
       would not need to override.

     - Fixed possible bug when flushing a data buffer where there
       is just a '0' in it.

     + Updated docs to note that StateCache config was deprecated
       as of 2.23.  Removed remaining code that referenced the config.

     + Removed references to unused OrderCollections code.

     - Better Cache meta key, lower chance of collision with 
       unrelated data since its using the full MD5 keyspace now

     + Optimized some debugging statements that resulted 
       from recent development.

     + Tie::TextDir .04 and above is supported for StateDB
       and CacheDB settings with MLDBM::Sync .21. This is good for 
       CacheDB where output is larger and there are not many 
       versions to cache, like for XSLTCache, where the site is 
       mostly static.

     + Better RESOURCES section to web site, especially with adding
       some links to past Apache::ASP articles & presentations.

    $VERSION = 2.25; $DATE="10/11/2001";
     + Improved ./site/apps/search application, for better
       search results at Apache::ASP site.  Also, reengineered
       application better, with more perl code moved to global.asa.
       Make use of MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File, where search database
       before was engineering around SDBM_File's shortcomings.

     - Fix for SessionSerialize config, which broke in 2.23
       Also, added t/session_serialize.t to test suite to catch
       this problem in the future.

    $VERSION = 2.23; $DATE="10/11/2001";
     +Make sure a couple other small standard modules get loaded
      upon "PerlModule Apache::ASP", like Time::HiRes, Class::Struct,
      and MLDBM::Serializer::Data::Dumper.  If not available
      these modules won't cause errors, but will promote child httpd
      RAM sharing if they are.

     -XMLSubs args parsing fix so an arg like z-index
      does not error under UseStrict.  This is OK now:

       <my:layer z-index=3 top=0 left=0> HTML </my:layer>

     -Only remove outermost <SCRIPT> tags from global.asa
      for IIS/PerlScript compatibility.  Used to remove
      all <SCRIPT> tags, which hurt when some subs in globa.asa
      would be printing some JavaScript.

     +$Response->{IsClientConnected} now updated correctly 
      before global.asa Script_OnStart.  $Response->IsClientConnect()
      can be used for accurate accounting, while 
      $Response->{IsClientConnected} only gets updated
      after $Response->Flush().  Added test cases to response.t

     +$Server->HTMLEncode(\$data) API extension, now can take
      scalar ref, which can give a 5% improvement in benchmarks
      for data 100K in size.

     -Access to $Application is locked when Application_OnEnd & 
      Application_OnStart is called, creating a critical section
      for use of $Application

     ++MLDBM::Sync used now for core DBM support in Apache::ASP::State.
      This drastically simplifies/stabilizes the code in there
      and will make it easier for future SQL database plugins.

     +New API for accessing ASP object information in non content
      handler phases:

        use Apache::ASP;
        sub My::Auth::handler {
          my $r = shift;
          my $ASP = Apache::ASP->new($r) 
          my $Session = $ASP->Session;
        }

      In the above example, $Session would be the same $Session
      object created later while running the ASP script for this
      same request.  

      Added t/asp_object.t test for this.  Fixed global.asa to only 
      init StateDir when application.asp starts which is the first 
      test script to run.

     -Fixed on Win32 to make Apache::ASP->new($r) able to create
      multiple master ASP objects per request.  Was not reentrant 
      safe before, particularly with state locking for dbms like 
      $Application & $Session.  

     ++Output caching for includes, built on same layer ( extended )
      as XSLTCache, test suite at t/cache.t.  Enabled with special 
      arguments to 

        $Response->Include(\%args, @include_args)
        $Response->TrapInclude(\%args, @include_args)
        $Server->Execute(\%args, @include_args)

      where %args = (
        File => 'file.inc',
        Cache => 1, # to activate cache layer
        Expires => 3600, # to expire in one hour
        LastModified => time() - 600, # to expire if cached before 10 minutes ago
        Key => $Request->Form, # to cache based on checksum of serialized form data,
        Clear => 1, # to not allow fetch from cache this time, will always execute include
      );

      Like the XSLTCache, it uses MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File
      by default, but can use DB_File or GDBM_File if
      CacheDB is set to these.

      See t/cache.t for API support until this is documented.

     +CacheSize now supports units of M, K, B like 

       CacheSize 10M
       CacheSize 10240K
       CacheSize 10000000B
       CacheSize 10000000

     -Better handling of $Session->Abandon() so multiple
      request to the same session while its being destroyed
      will have the right effect.

     +Optimized XMLSubs parsing.  Scripts with lots lof XMLSubs 
      now parse faster for the first time.  One test script with 
      almost 200 such tags went from a parse time of around 3 seconds
      to .7 seconds after optimizations.

     +Updated performance tuning docs, particularly for using
      Apache::ASP->Loader()

     +$Server->URL($url, \%params) now handles array refs
      in the params values like
        $Server->URL($url, { key => [ qw( value1 value2 ) ] })

      This is so that query string data found in 
      $Request->QueryString that gets parsed into this form
      from a string like: ?key=value&key=value2 would be 
      able to be reused passed back to $Server->URL to 
      create self referencing URLs more easily.

     -Bug fix where XMLSubs like <s:td /> now works on perl 
      5.005xx, thanks to Philip Mak for reporting & fix.

     +When searching for included files, will now join
      the absolute path of the directory of the script
      with the name of the file if its a relative file
      name like ./header.inc.  Before, would just look
      for something like ././header.inc by using '.'
      as the first directory to look for includes in.

      The result of this is that scripts in two directories
      configured with the same Global setting should be able
      to have separate local header.inc files without causing
      a cached namespace collision.

     +$Server->Config() call will return a hash ref 
      to all the config setting for that request, like
      Apache->dir_config would.

     -StatINC setting with Apache::ASP->Loader() works again.
      This makes StatINC & StatINCMatch settings viable 
      for production & development use when the system has
      very many modules.

     -Cookieless session support with configs like SessionQueryParse
      and SessionQuery now work for URLs with frags in them
      like http://localhost?arg=value#frag

     +@rv = $Response->Include() now works where there are
      multiple return values from an include like:
      <% return(1,2); %>

    $VERSION = 2.21; $DATE="8/5/2001";
     +Documented RequestParams config in CONFIG misc section.

     +Documented new XSLT caching directives.

     +Updated ./site/eg/.htaccess XSLT example config
      to use XSLTCache setting.

     +New FAQ section on why perl variables are sticky globals,
      suggested by Mark Seger.

     -push Global directory onto @INC during ASP script execution
      Protect contents of original @INC with local.  This makes
      things compatible with .09 Apache::ASP where we always had
      Global in @INC.  Fixed needed by Henrik Tougaard

     - ; is a valid separator like & for QueryString Parameters
      Fixed wanted by Anders

     -XSMLSubsMatch doc fix in CONFIG section

     +Reduces number of Session groups to 16 from 32, so 
      session manager for small user sets will be that much faster.

     +optimizations for internal database, $Application, and $Session
      creation.

     +XSLTCache must be set for XSLT caching to begin using CacheDir

     +CacheDB like StateDB bug sets dbm format for caching, which
      defaults to MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File, which works well for caching
      output sizes < 50K

     +CacheDir config for XSLT caching ... defaults to StateDir

     +CacheSize in bytes determines whether the caches in CacheDir
      are deleted at the end of the request.  A cache will be 
      reset in this way back to 0 bytes. Defaults to 10000000 bytes
      or about 10M.

     +Caching infrastructure work that is being used in XSLT
      can be leveraged later for output caching of includes,
      or arbitrary user caching.

     -t/server_mail.t test now uses valid email for testing
      purposes ... doesn't actually send a mail, but for SMTP
      runtime validation purposes it should be OK.

     +fixed where POST data was read from under MOD_PERL,
      harmless bug this was that just generated the wrong
      system debugging message.

    $VERSION = 2.19; $DATE="7/10/2001";
     +update docs in various parts

     +added ./make_httpd/build_httpds.sh scripts for quick builds
      of apache + mod_perl + mod_ssl

     ++plain CGI mode available for ASP execution.  
      cgi/asp script can now be used to execute ASP 
      scripts in CGI mode.  See CGI perldoc section for more info.
      The examples in ./site/eg have been set up to run
      in cgi mode if desired.  Configuration in CGI section
      only tested for Apache on Linux.

     -Fixed some faulty or out of date docs in XML/XSLT section.

     +added t/server_mail.t test for $Server->Mail(), requires
      Net::SMTP to be configured properly to succeed.

     +Net::SMTP debugging not enabled by Debug 1,2,3 configs,
      not only when system debugging is set with Debug -1,-2,-3
      However, a Debug param passed to $Server->Mail() will 
      sucessfully override the Debug -1,-2,-3 setting even
      when its Debug => 0

     -Check for undef values during stats for inline includes
      so we don't trigger unintialized warnings

     +Documented ';' may separate many directories in the IncludesDir
      setting for creating a more flexible includes search path.

    $VERSION = 2.17; $DATE="6/17/2001";
     +Added ASP perl mmm-mode subclass and configuration
      in editors/mmm-asp-perl.el file for better emacs support.
      Updated SYNTAX/Editors documentation.

     +Better debugging error message for Debug 2 or 3 settings 
      for global.asa errors.  Limit debug output for lines
      preceding rendered script.

     -In old inline include mode, there should no longer
      be the error "need id for includes" when using
      $Response->Include() ... if DynamicIncludes were
      enabled, this problem would not have likely occured
      anyway.  DynamicIncludes are preferrable to use so
      that compiled includes can be shared between scripts.
      This bug was likely introduced in version 2.11.

     -Removed logging from $Response->BinaryWrite() in regular
      debug mode 1 or 2.  Logging still enabled in system Debug mode, -1 or -2

     -Removed other extra system debugging call that is really not
      necessary.

    $VERSION = 2.15; $DATE="06/12/2001";
     -Fix for running under perl 5.6.1 by removing parser optimization
      introduced in 2.11.

     -Now file upload forms, forms with ENCTYPE="multipart/form-data"
      can have multiple check boxes and select items marked for 
      @params = $Request->Form('param_name') functionality.  This 
      will be demonstrated via the ./site/eg/file_upload.asp example.

    $VERSION = 2.11; $DATE="05/29/2001";
     +Parser optimization from Dariusz Pietrzak

     -work around for global destruction error message for perl 5.6
      during install

     +$Response->{IsClientConnected} now will be set
      correctly with ! $r->connection->aborted after each
      $Response->Flush()

     +New XSLTParser config which can be set to XML::XSLT or
      XML::Sablotron.  XML::Sablotron renders 10 times faster, 
      but differently.  XML::XSLT is pure perl, so has wider
      platform support than XML::Sablotron.  This config affects
      both the XSLT config and the $Server->XSLT() method.

     +New $Server->XSLT(\$xsl_data, \$xml_data) API which 
      allows runtime XSLT on components instead of having to process
      the entire ASP output as XSLT.  

     -XSLT support for XML::XSL 0.32.  Things broke after .24.

     -XSLTCacheSize config no longer supported.  Was a bad 
      Tie::Cache implementation.  Should be file based cache
      to greatly increases cache hit ratio.

     ++$Response->Include(), $Response->TrapInclude(),
      and $Server->Execute() will all take a scalar ref
      or \'asdfdsafa' type code as their first argument to execute 
      a raw script instead of a script file name.  At this time, 
      compilation of such a script, will not be cached.  It is 
      compiled/executed as an anonymous subroutine and will be freed
      when it goes out of scope.

     + -p argument to cgi/asp script to set GlobalPackage
      config for static site builds

     -pod commenting fix where windows clients are used for 
      ASP script generation.

     +Some nice performance enhancements, thank to submissions from
      Ime Smits.  Added some 1-2% per request execution speed.

     +Added StateDB MLDBM::Sync::SDBM_File support for faster
      $Session + $Application than DB_File, yet still overcomes
      SDBM_File's 1024 bytes value limitation.  Documented in 
      StateDB config, and added Makefile.PL entry.

     +Removed deprecated MD5 use and replace with Digest::MD5 calls

     +PerlSetVar InodeNames 1 config which will compile scripts hashed by 
      their device & inode identifiers, from a stat($file)[0,1] call.
      This allows for script directories, the Global directory,
      and IncludesDir directories to be symlinked to without
      recompiling identical scripts.  Likely only works on Unix
      systems.  Thanks to Ime Smits for this one.

     +Streamlined code internally so that includes & scripts were
      compiled by same code.  This is a baby step toward fusing
      include & script code compilation models, leading to being
      able to compile bits of scripts on the fly as ASP subs, 
      and being able to garbage collect ASP code subroutines.

     -removed @_ = () in script compilation which would trigger warnings 
      under PerlWarn being set, thanks for Carl Lipo for reporting this.

     -StatINC/StatINCMatch fix for not undeffing compiled includes
      and pages in the GlobalPackage namespace

     -Create new HTML::FillInForm object for each FormFill
      done, to avoid potential bug with multiple forms filled
      by same object.  Thanks to Jim Pavlick for the tip.

     +Added PREREQ_PM to Makefile.PL, so CPAN installation will
      pick up the necessary modules correctly, without having
      to use Bundle::Apache::ASP, thanks to Michael Davis. 

     + > mode for opening lock files, not >>, since its faster

     +$Response->Flush() fixed, by giving $| = 1 perl hint
      to $r->print() and the rest of the perl sub.

     +$Response->{Cookies}{cookie_name}{Expires} = -86400 * 300;
      works so negative relative time may be used to expire cookies.

     +Count() + Key() Collection class API implementations

     +Added editors/aasp.vim VIM syntax file for Apache::ASP,
      courtesy of Jon Topper.

     ++Better line numbering with #line perl pragma.  Especially
      helps with inline includes.  Lots of work here, & integrated
      with Debug 2 runtime pretty print debugging.

     +$Response->{Debug} member toggles on/off whether 
      $Response->Debug() is active, overriding the Debug setting
      for this purpose.  Documented.

     -When Filter is on, Content-Length won't be set and compression
      won't be used.  These things would not work with a filtering
      handler after Apache::ASP

    $VERSION = 2.09; $DATE="01/30/2001";
     +Examples in ./site/eg are now UseStrict friendly.  
      Also fixed up ./site/eg/ssi_filter.ssi example.

     +Auto purge of old stale session group directories, increasing 
      session manager performance when using Sessions when migrating
      to Apache::ASP 2.09+ from older versions.

     +SessionQueryParse now works for all $Response->{ContentType}
      starting with 'text' ... before just worked with text/html,
      now other text formats like wml will work too. 

     +32 groups instead of 64, better inactive site session group purging.

     +Default session-id length back up to 32 hex bytes.
      Better security vs. performance, security more important,
      especially when performance difference was very little.

     +PerlSetVar RequestParams 1 creates $Request->Params
      object with combined contents of $Request->QueryString
      and $Request->Form

     ++FormFill feature via HTML::FillInForm.  Activate with
      $Response->{FormFill} = 1 or PerlSetVar FormFill 1
      See site/eg/formfill.asp for example.

     ++XMLSubs tags of the same name may be embedded in each other
      recursively now.

     +No umask() use on Win32 as it seems unclear what it would do

     +simpler Apache::ASP::State file handle mode of >> when opening 
      lock file.  saves doing a -e $file test.

     +AuthServerVariables config to init $Request->ServerVariables
      with basic auth data as documented.  This used to be default
      behavior, but triggers "need AuthName" warnings from recent
      versions of Apache when AuthName is not set.

     -Renamed Apache::ASP::Loader class to Apache::ASP::Load
      as it collided with the Apache::ASP->Loader() function
      namespace.  Class used internally by Apache::ASP->Loader()
      so no public API changed here.

     +-Read of POST input for $Request->BinaryRead() even
       if its not from a form.  Only set up $Request->Form
       if this is from a form POST.

     +faster POST/GET param parsing

    $VERSION = 2.07; $DATE="11/26/2000";
     -+-+ Session Manager
      empty state group directories are not removed, thus alleviating
      one potential race condition.  This impacted performance
      on idle sites severely as there were now 256 directories
      to check, so made many performance enhancements to the 
      session manager.  The session manager is built to handle
      up to 20,000 client sessions over a 20 minute period.  It
      will slow the system down as it approaches this capacity.

      One such enhancement was session-ids now being 11 bytes long 
      so that its .lock file is only 16 characters in length.  
      Supposedly some file systems lookup files 16 characters or 
      less in a fast hashed lookup.  This new session-id has
      4.4 x 10^12 possible values.  I try to keep this space as
      large as possible to prevent a brute force attack.

      Another enhancement was to limit the group directories
      to 64 by only allowing the session-id prefix to be [0-3][0-f]
      instead of [0-f][0-f], checking 64 empty directories on an
      idle site takes little time for the session manager, compared
      to 256 which felt significant from the client end, especially
      on Win32 where requests are serialized.  

      If upgrading to this version, you would do well to delete
      empty StateDir group directories while your site is idle.
      Upgrading during an idle time will have a similar effect,
      as old Apache::ASP versions would delete empty directories.

     -$Application->GetSession($session_id) now creates
      an session object that only lasts until the next
      invocation of $Application->GetSession().  This is 
      to avoid opening too many file handles at once,
      where each session requires opening a lock file.

     +added experimental support for Apache::Filter 1.013 
      filter_register call

     +make test cases for $Response->Include() and 
      $Response->TrapInclude()

     +Documented CollectionItem config.

     +New $Request->QueryString('multiple args')->Count()
      interface implemented for CollectionItem config.
      Also $Request->QueryString('multiple args')->Item(1) method.
      Note ASP collections start counting at 1.

     --fixed race condition, where multiple processes might 
      try creating the same state directory at the same time, with
      one winning, and one generating an error.  Now, web process
      will recheck for directory existence and error if 
      it doesn't. 

     -global.asa compilation will be cached correctly, not
      sure when this broke.  It was getting reloaded every request.

     -StateAllWrite config, when set creates state files
      with a+rw or 0666 permissions, and state directories
      with a+rwx or 0777 permissions.  This allows web servers
      running as different users on the same machine to share a 
      common StateDir config.  Also StateGroupWrite config
      with perms 0770 and 0660 respectively.

     -Apache::ASP->Loader() now won't follow links to 
      directories when searching for scripts to load.

     +New RegisterIncludes config which is on by default only
      when using Apache::ASP->Loader(), for compiling includes
      when precompiling scripts.

     +Apache::ASP::CompileInclude path optimized, which underlies
      $Response->Include()

     +$Request->QueryString->('foo')->Item() syntax enabled
      with CollectionItem config setting.  Default syntax
      supported is $Request->QueryString('foo') which is
      in compatible.  Other syntax like $Request->{Form}{foo}
      and $Request->Form->Item('foo') will work in either case.

     +New fix suggested for missing Apache reference in 
      Apache::ASP handler startup for RedHat RPMs.  Added
      to error message.

     --Backup flock() unlocking try for QNX will not corrupt the 
      normal flock() LOCK_UN usage, after trying to unlock a file
      that doesn't exist.  This bug was uncovered from the below 
      group deletion race condition that existed. 

     -Session garbage collection will not delete new group
      directories that have just been created but are empty.
      There was a race condition where a new group directory would
      be created, but then deleted by a garbage collector before
      it could be initialized correctly with new state files.

     +Better random session-id checksums for $Session creation.
      per process srand() initialization, because srand() 
      may be called once prefork and never called again.
      Call without arguments to rely on perl's decent rand
      seeding.  Then when calling rand() in Secret() we have
      enough random data, that even if someone else calls srand()
      to something fixed, should not mess things up terribly since
      we checksum things like $$ & time, as well as perl memory
      references.

     +XMLSubs installation make test.

     -Fix for multiline arguments for XMLSubs

    $VERSION = 2.03; $DATE="08/01/2000";
     +License change to GPL.  See LICENSE section.

     +Setup of www.apache-asp.org site, finally!

     -get rid of Apache::ASP->Loader() warning message for perl 5.6.0

    $VERSION = 2.01; $DATE="07/22/2000";
     +$data_ref = $Response->TrapInclude('file.inc') API
      extension which allows for easy post processing of
      data from includes

     +./site/eg/source.inc syntax highlighting improvements

     +XMLSubsMatch compile time parsing performance improvement

    $VERSION = 2.00; $DATE="07/15/2000";
     -UniquePackages config works again, broke a couple versions back

     +better error handling for methods called on $Application
      that don't exist, hard to debug before

    $VERSION = 1.95; $DATE="07/10/2000";
     !!!!! EXAMPLES SECURITY BUG FOUND & FIXED !!!!!

     --FIXED: distribution example ./site/eg/source.asp now parses 
      out special characters of the open() call when reading local 
      files.

      This bug would allow a malicious user possible writing
      of files in the same directory as the source.asp script.  This
      writing exploit would only have effect if the web server user
      has write permission on those files.

      !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     -$0 now set to transferred file, when using $Server->Transfer

     -Fix for XMLSubsMatch parsing on cases with 2 or more args passed
      to tag sub that was standalone like 
        <Apps:header type="header" title="Moo" foo="moo" />

    $VERSION = 1.93; $DATE="07/03/2000";
     -sub second timing with Time::HiRes was adding <!-- -->
      comments by HTML by default, which would possibly
      break specific programs looking for precise HTML output.
      Now this behavior must be explicitly turned on with
      the TimeHiRes config setting.

      These comments will only appear in HTML only if 
      Debug is enabled as well.

      Timed log entries will only occur if 
      system debugging is enabled, with Debug -1 or -2

    $VERSION = 1.91; $DATE="07/02/2000";
     +Documented XMLSubsMatch & XSLT* configuration
      settings in CONFIG section.

     +XSLT XSL template is now first executed as an 
      ASP script just like the XML scripts.  This is 
      just one step away now from implementing XSP logic.

     +$Server->Execute and $Server->Transfer API extensions
      implemented.  Execute is the same as $Request->Include()
      and $Server->Transfer is like an apache internal redirect
      but keeps the current ASP objects for the next script.

      Added examples, transfer.htm, and modified dynamic_includes.htm.

     +Better compile time error debugging with Debug 2 or -2.
      Will hilite/link the buggy line for global.asa errors, 
      include errors, and XML/XSLT errors just like with 
      ASP scripts before.

     +Nice source hiliting when viewing source for the example
      scripts.

     +Runtime string writing optimization for static HTML going
      through $Response.

     +New version numbering just like everyone else.  Starting at 1.91
      since I seem to be off by a factor of 10, last release would have
      been 1.9.

    $VERSION = 0.19; $DATE="NOT RELEASED";
     +XMLSubsMatch and XSLT* settings documented in 
      the XML/XSLT section of the site/README.

     -XMLSubsMatch will strip parens in a pattern match
      so it does not interfere with internal matching use.

     +XSLT integration allowing XML to be rendered by XSLT
      on the fly.  XSLT specifies XSL file to transform XML.
      XSLTMatch is a regexp that matches XML file names, like \.xml$,
      which will be transformed by XSLT setting, default .*
  
      XSLTCacheSize when specified uses Tie::Cache to cached XML DOMs 
      internally and cache XSLT transformations output per XML/XSL 
      combination.  XML DOM objects can take a lot of RAM, so use
      this setting judiciously like setting to 100.  Definitely 
      experiment with this value.

     +More client info in the error mail feature, including
      client IP, form data, query string, and HTTP_* client headers

     +With Time::HiRes loaded, and Debug set to non 0, 
      will add a <!-- Apache::ASP served request in xx.xx seconds -->
      to text/html output, similar to Cocoon, per user request  
      Will also add this to the system debug error log output
      when Debug is < 0

     -bug fix on object initialization optimization earlier
      in this release, that was introduced for faster event
      handler execution.

     +Apache::ASP::Parse() takes a file name, scalar, or
      scalar ref for arguments of data to parse for greater
      integration ability with other applications.

     +PodComments optimization, small speed increase at
      compilation time.

     +String optimization on internal rendering that avoids 
      unnecessary copying of static html, by using refs.  Should 
      make a small difference on sites with large amounts of 
      static html.

     +CompressGzip setting which, when Compress::Zlib is installed,
      will compress text/html automatically going out to the web
      browser if the client supports gzip encoding.

     ++Script_OnFlush event handler, and auxiliary work optimizing
      asp events in general.  $Response->{BinaryRef} created which
      is a reference to outgoing output, which can be used 
      to modify the data at runtime before it goes out to the client. 

     +Some code optimizations that boost speed from 22 to 24 
      hits per second when using Sessions without $Application,
      on a simple hello world benchmark on a WinNT PII300.

     ++Better SessionManagement, more aware of server farms that 
      don't have reliable NFS locking.  The key here is to have only
      one process on one server in charge of session garbage collection
      at any one time, and try to create this situation with a snazzy
      CleanupMaster routine.  This is done by having a process register
      itself in the internal database with a server key created at
      apache start time.  If this key gets stale, another process can 
      become the master, and this period will not exceed the period
      SessionTimeout / StateManager.

      ** Work on session manager sponsored by LRN, http://www.lrn.com.  **
      ** This work was used to deploy a server farm in production with  **
      ** NFS mounted StateDir. Thanks to Craig Samuel for his belief in **
      ** open source. :)                                                **

      Future work for server farm capabilities might include breaking
      up the internal database into one of 256 internal databases 
      hashed by the first 2 chars of the session id.  Also on the plate
      is Apache::Session like abilities with locking and/or data storage
      occuring in a SQL database.  The first dbs to be done will include
      MySQL & Oracle.

     +Better session security which will create a new session id for an 
      incoming session id that does not match one already seen.  This will
      help for those with Search engines that have bookmarked
      pages with the session ids in the query strings.  This breaks away
      from standard ASP session id implementation which will automatically
      use the session id presented by the browser, now a new session id will
      be returned if the presented one is invalid or expired.

     -$Application->GetSession will only return a session if
      one already existed.  It would create one before by default.

     +Script_OnFlush global.asa event handler, and $Response->{BinaryRef}
      member which is a scalar reference to the content about to be flushed.
      See ./site/eg/global.asa for example usage, used in this case to
      insert font tags on the fly into the output.

     +Highlighting and linking of line error when Debug is set to 2 or -2.

     --removed fork() call from flock() backup routine? How did 
       that get in there?  Oh right, testing on Win32. :(
       Very painful lesson this one, sorry to whom it may concern.

     +$Application->SessionCount support turned off by default
      must enable with SessionCount config option.  This feature
      puts an unnecessary load on busy sites, so not default 
      behavior now.  

     ++XMLSubsMatch setting that allows the developer to 
      create custom tags XML style that execute perl subroutines.
      See ./site/eg/xml_subs.asp

     +MailFrom config option that defaults the From: field for 
      mails sent via the Mail* configs and $Server->Mail()

     +$Server->Mail(\%mail, %smtp_args) API extension

     +MailErrorsTo & MailAlertTo now can take comma
      separated email addresses for multiple recipients.

     -tracking of subroutines defined in scripts and includes so 
      StatINC won't undefine them when reloading the GlobalPackage, 
      and so an warning will be logged when another script redefines 
      the same subroutine name, which has been the bane of at least
      a few developers.

     -Loader() will now recompile dynamic includes that 
      have changed, even if main including script has not.
      This is useful if you are using Loader() in a 
      PerlRestartHandler, for reloading scripts when
      gracefully restarting apache.

     -Apache::ASP used to always set the status to 200 by 
      default explicitly with $r->status().  This would be 
      a problem if a script was being used to as a 404 
      ErrorDocument, because it would always return a 200 error
      code, which is just wrong.  $Response->{Status} is now 
      undefined by default and will only be used if set by 
      the developer.  

      Note that by default a script will still return a 200 status, 
      but $Response->{Status} may be used to override this behavior.

     +$Server->Config($setting) API extension that allows developer
      to access config settings like Global, StateDir, etc., and is a 
      wrapper around Apache->dir_config($setting)

     +Loader() will log the number of scripts
      recompiled and the number of scripts checked, instead
      of just the number of scripts recompiled, which is
      misleading as it reports 0 for child httpds after
      a parent fork that used Loader() upon startup.        

     -Apache::ASP->Loader() would have a bad error if it didn't load 
      any scripts when given a directory, prints "loaded 0 scripts" now

    $VERSION = 0.18; $DATE="02/03/2000";
     +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 SESSIONS 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 file handles 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://localhost , 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 enabled,
      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 = 0.17; $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 gets 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 = 0.16; $DATE="09/22/99";
     -$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 caching ... 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 = 0.15; $DATE="08/24/1999";
     --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
      performance 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 definite 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 = 0.14; $DATE="07/29/1999";
     -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 = 0.12; $DATE="07/01/1999";
     -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 = 0.11; $DATE="06/24/1999";
     +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 undeffing 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 = 0.10; $DATE="05/24/1999";
     += 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 
      white space 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 directory, script output is written to STDOUT

    $VERSION = 0.09; $DATE="04/22/1999";
     +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 = 0.08; $DATE="02/06/1999";
     ++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 = 0.07; $DATE="01/20/1999";
     -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 seamlessly.

     -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 garbage collection under modperl, esp. w/ file uploads

    $VERSION = 0.06; $DATE="12/21/1998";
     +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 operating systems with caching file 
      systems.

     +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 = 0.05; $DATE="10/19/1998";
     +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 = 0.04; $DATE="10/14/1998";
     +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 = 0.03; $DATE="09/14/1998";
     +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 = 0.02; $DATE="07/12/1998";
     ++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 = 0.01; $DATE="06/26/1998";
     Syntax Support
     --------------
     Initial release, 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.

LICENSE
    Copyright (c) 1998-2008, Josh 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.

    Apache::ASP is a perl native port of Active Server Pages for Apache and
    mod_perl.

