What's new in 4.5

This is a partial list of new features and major changes in AOLserver 4.5 (compared to 4.0). If you know of anything that is missing, please add it.

Connection Management:

• New ns_pools command to map method/URL's to specific thread pools.
• New ns_limits command control the number of threads executing and/or waiting for execution by method/URL.

I/O Features:

• New Ns_QueueWait API to enable event-driven callbacks in the driver thread before dispatching to pools for processing.
• Added ability to manage larger file uploads by spooling to a temporary file.

ADP Improvements:

• Added a new execution caching technique at the ns_adp_include level which allows you to save the results of execution of an included ADP and includes below that for reuse on subsequent connections up to a specified time.
• Added singlescript config option which turns ADP pages into a single script enabling syntax such as "<% foreach e $list { %> element <%= $e %> here <% } %>".
• Added output buffer improvements via new Ns_ConnFlush.
• Added automatic UTF-8 to output charset encoding.
• Added gzip output compression.
• Added streaming output in chunked-encoding format instead of the previous "response with no length" HTTP/1.0 method.
• Enhanced ADP error handling and reporting.

Other Improvements:

• New Ns_TclRegisterTrace API to enable callbacks at key state transition points in a much more natural way. The ns_ictl command has been updated to support script-level traces.
• New Ns_Task API designed to replace the old Ns_SockCallback API which didn't do a very good job at managing timeouts along with I/O events.
• New ns_returnmoved command to return 301 http status code and redirect to a new URL.
• New ns_cache command based on ideas from the ns_cache module. This is not backward compatible with the ns_cache module.
• Added new ns_register_fastpath command to re-enable fastpath after a previous call to ns_register_proc.
• Added ability to access more AOLserver functionality from a tclsh (nsv_*, ns_thread, etc).
• Stack checking has returned. In a multi-threaded application like AOLserver, stack checking is important for detecting buffer overruns and deep call trees blowing your thread stack, etc.
• More detailed information when logging uncaught Tcl errors. Especially for connection threads, details of the HTTP request are logged to make diagnosing the root cause of errors easier.