Virtual Platform Toolkit / News: Recent posts

The VPTK, and VPTKSSL sources are now in CVS on SourceForge.

The test suite will follow as time permits.

The VP WebServer sample application is now available.

It is somewhat primitive, but does show how
to use the toolkit.

* Sun Mar 19 2000 John Allen <john.allen@oceanfree.net> 0.3.50-1mdk
- Update to latest sources which are compatible with the VPTK-SSL library.
- Encryptor framework no longer does in place encryption, this is because
some encryption algorithms (eg. Blowfish) increase the size of the data after
encryption. Instead the data is read from one stream and written to
another.
- Changed the encryptor calls in the DOM parser to use the modified
encryptor framework.
- Added support for character entities to the DOM parser, and DOM writer.
- Added a hard limit of 4095 bytes per token in the DOM parser. This will
have to be changed in the future, as it is a ridiculous limitation, but was
necessary to prevent the parser core dumping on garbage, or really large
tokens.
- Additional exceptions have been added to the HTTP classes, specifically
NoMethodSpecified, NoURLSpecified, and NoHTTPRevisionSpecified.
- The Mutex class has been modified, so that on Windows mutexs are allocated
dynamically. This was done to alleviate resource overuse on Windows95/98
which made applications really slow when using large numbers of objects
derived from Bindable. This change has the side-effect that all mutex
locks, and unlocks now require an additional lock, and unlock on a
global mutex. This global mutex may have a negative effect on performance,
but in practice appears to have made applications which have large numbers of
objects significantly faster on Windows95/98.
- An additional function CheckDNS() has been implemented which will throw the
following exceptions if DNS does not appear to be working properly.
CannotDetermineHostname, the gethostname() call failed.
MisconfiguredDNS, either the hostname could not be resolved to an IP address,
or the resultant IP address could not be resolved back to the hostname.
- A default SockAddr constructor has been added. This constructor initialises
the IP address to 0.0.0.0
- Reverse lookup failure in the SockAddr will still add the IP address to
the addresses list.
- The default max pending connections in the listen has been increased to 20.
- Writing 0 bytes to a SockStream is no longer an error.
- An option to set the maximum number of concurrent connections to a
multi-threaded socket server ha been added. The default is 30.

Release 0.1.1 of the VPTK has been uploaded.
.tar.gz, .src.rpm, and a Mandrake 7.0 binary .rpm
can now be downloaded from http://download.sourceforge.net/vptk/

The SSL support has been removed from the base library,
but a new SSL library will be released soon. The JAWS
demo webserver has also been removed and will be released
as a seperate project, as soon as I do a bit of work on it
to make it a realistic web server.