WebKit 1.0 Release Notes

WebKit version 1.0 released on 11/29/08

Introduction

This release contains a few improvements and bugfixes, and it allows better monitoring and handling of long-running threads in the ThreadedAppServer.

New Features

• Instead of using the standard WebKit adapter mod_webkit, you can also use any SCGI adapter such as mod_scgi (not part of Webware for Python). For details, see the installation and configuration guides.
• The ThreadedAppServer has got a new method abortRequest() allowing the abortion of the worker thread processing a request specified by its request id. This feature needs a recent version of ctypes and Python (2.3 or higher). The _canAbortRequest attribute tells you whether this feature is available.
• The new AppServer.config setting 'MaxRequestTime' allows monitoring long-running requests. All requests with an execution time longer than 'MaxRequestTime' seconds will be automatically aborted. This feature is disabled by setting 'MaxRequestTime' to 0 or None.
• The SMTP authentication when sending error emails has been improved, and it is now possible to use SMTP after POP by adding the name of the POP server to the ``ErrorEmailServer`` setting (Roger Haase).
• HTTPRequests have got two new methods scheme() and hostAndPort() returning the respective URL parts.

Improvements and Refinements

• If an exception occurs within a Task scheduled by the Application TaskManager (obtained from application.taskManager()), the exception will be handled by the Application's exception handler (i.e. the exception will be logged and emailed if the appropriate settings have been enabled within Application.config).
• The _action_ prefix for Webware actions can now be changed by overriding HTTPContent._actionPrefix, or setting this to None if you don't want to use actions at all.
• The error email messages are now created using the email module instead of using the deprecated MimeWriter module for Python 2.2 and higher.

Bugfixes

• ThreadedAppServer could crash with socket error during nmap scan on NetBSD (reported by Patrick TJ McPhee), this should be fixed now.
• Fixed bug with "Memory" Session configuration (as suggested by Steve Schwarz).
• HTTPResponse created a Session for every request (bug reported by Ben Parker).
• In the case of nested transactions (when you use forwarding), the session is now only awakened and put to sleep once by the outmost transaction (as suggested by Ben Parker).
• Made Transaction.die() work properly with Python 2.2 and higher, where WebKit.Object is a new-style class.
• Changed the urlRedirect hook to behave as documented when the urlRedirect dictionary has an empty string as key.
• __init__.py is not created any more if __init__.pyc exists (Andrew Gaul).
• The UseAutomaticPathSessions did not works with Microsoft IIS (bug #494764 reported by Geoff Talvola).