Home Appweb Features Download Licensing
Getting Started Quick Start Installing Appweb Starting and Stopping Running as a Service Release Notes Building from Source Building with CGI Building with FastCGI Building with Proxy Building with OpenSSL Building with PHP
User's Guide Configuring Appweb Configuration Directives Web Frameworks Using Loadable Modules Ports and Binding Routing Requests Request Pipeline Multi-Language Content User Authentication Logging Caching Virtual Hosts Secure Sockets (SSL) Http Client Security Considerations Monitoring and Defending File Upload WebSockets Man Pages
Developer's Guide Embedding Appweb Creating Appweb Modules Creating Appweb Handlers Using the Action Handler Creating Pipeline Stages Serving Pages from ROM Migrating from Earlier Releases
Reference Guide Compatibility Native APIs Appweb Architecture Appweb Memory Allocation Multithreaded Programming HTTP References
Appweb News Appweb Web Site
Samples chroot-server cpp-handler cpp-module deploy-server esp-hosted esp-upload login-basic login-database max-server min-server secure-server simple-action simple-client simple-handler simple-module simple-server spy-filter ssl-server tiny-server typical-server websockets-chat websockets-echo websockets-output
Links Embedthis Web Site Embedthis Blog Twitter
Embedthis Appweb Site Appweb News Blog Twitter
Home
/
Developer's Guide
/
Migrating

Migrating to Appweb 4.X

This document provides some guidance when upgrading to the latest Appweb release.

Appweb 1-3

If you are migrating from Appweb 1, 2 or 3, you should regard the latest Appweb as a next generation web server. You can migrate code from Appweb 1, 2 or 3 to Appweb latest, however, you should anticipate significant refactoring work in the transition.

Changes in Appweb 4

Appweb 4 provides equivalent or greater functionality to that in Appweb 3. While Appweb 4 may have a different interface or API, the capabilities of Appweb 3 have been continued in Appweb 4, and in many cases, the features have been enhanced.

New Capabilities

The following new capabilities have been added to Appweb 4 (and have no equivalent in Appweb 3). These additions should not require adjustment for applications developed under Appweb 3.

Changed Capabilities

The following capabilities have been changed and may impact your Appweb 3 applications.

MakeMe Changes

When migrating from an Appweb version that used Bit for building, please not the following changes:

Removed Capabilities

Changed APIs

Many of the internal APIs in Appweb 4 have been changed. This is due to the utilization of a common Http library between Appweb and ESP. Appweb 3 APIs have been renamed/converted on a function by function basis to equivalent APIs in Appweb 4. The APIs have very similar names to the previous counterpart.

Memory Allocator

Appweb 4 includes a high performance memory allocator and generational garbage collector. The allocator is a fast and immediate coalescing allocator. It is optimized for frequent allocations of small blocks and uses a background collector to free unused memory.

The garbage collector is somewhat unusual in a C program. However, garbage collection is especially well suited to long running applications like a web server since it virtually eliminates memory leaks. Unlike traditional memory allocation where free must be called, Appweb 4 uses the opposite approach: memory that must be retained needs to be actively managed to prevent garbage collection. This means that a managed reference must be held for all active memory. See Memory Allocation for more details.

The Appweb 3 memory API required a memory context argument for all memory allocations. This required many APIs to have a memory context as the first parameter. Appweb 4 does not require this and these APIs have removed the memory context parameter.

Migrating Appweb Configuration Files

The Appweb 4 configuration file is substantially the same as the Appweb 3. 'Include' directives can now contain wild cards and there are several new directives supporting Routing, Multi-language support and the Embedded Server Pages web framework. The big change is that Route directives replace the Directory and Location directives.

Routes vs Directory/Location Directives

Appweb 4 uses a more flexible Route directive instead of the Appweb 2/3 Directory and Location directives. The Route directive has more flexibility and allows powerful regular expression URI parsing and routing. In nearly all cases, Location and Directory directives should easily migrate to Route directives.

See Configuring Appweb and Configuration Directives for more details.

Migrating Modules and Handlers

Appweb 4 modules use modified API signatures to initialize with Appweb. In Appweb 4, the MPR module is pre-created and passed into the module. See the Creating Modules document for more details.

In many cases, the new Embedded Server Pages (ESP) web framework provides a simpler and more flexible way to add functionality to Appweb compared with custom handlers and modules. ESP allows the easy binding of "C" language functions to request URIs via powerful Controllers and the Appweb routing engine.

Embedded Server Pages

ESP is the single biggest change in Appweb 4. ESP is a powerful Model/View/Controller web framework that offers:

Migrating CGI Programs

CGI programs should migrate unchanged. The CGI handler in Appweb 4 offers much higher performance by using pipes for I/O instead of files.

© Embedthis Software. All rights reserved.