Rudiments 0.55.0 Release Announcement

It's official. Version 0.55.0 of Rudiments, the C++ class library for developing systems and applications, is now available.

What's new in this release? Read on...

Security Framework

The most significant new feature is a security framework. A securitycontext may now be attached to a filedescriptor to enable encrypted reads and writes. The securitycontext class is just an interface though, and there are currently gsscontext and tlscontext implementations of it.

The gsscontext class and associated classes implement a wrapper on top of the GSSAPI on Linux/Unix and SSPI on Windows. This primarily provides Kerberos encryption and authentication, though on Windows it could be used for NTLM as well.

The tlscontext class and associated classes implement a wrapper on top of OpenSSL on Linux/Unix and, again, SSPI on Windows. This provides Transport Layer Security, or it's predecessor Secure Socket Layer, on both platforms.

See the Rudiments class reference for detailed information about all gss and tls classes. Comprehensive code examples are provided in the test directory of the source distribution as well: gssserver.cpp, gssclient.cpp, tlsserver.cpp, and tlsclient.cpp

Thread Class Improvements

The thread class has been improved a bit.

If constrained system resources cause run() to fail, it automatically retries now, and this behavior can be adjusted with the retryFailedRun()/dontRetryFailedRun() methods.

A thread can now be created in a detached state with the runDetached() method, rather than having to be detached later, which can cause a race condition.

The cancel() method has been removed now too, as it was the primary culprit in creating the aforementioned race condition, and can't be implemented on Windows at all.

Thread methods are more robust as well. They all verify that the thread is actually valid before attempting to operate on it. Not doing this caused crashes and odd behavior on some platforms.

Versioning

The keen eye might observe the uncharacteristic .0 trailing the Rudiments version number. As of this version, Rudiments has adopted Semantic Versioning for the project and Libtool Versioning for library files on Linux/Unix. Hopefully, between the two, version-compatibility should be more intuitive.

General Bug Fixes

There were a slew of bug fixes as well, though most were very obscure and difficult to encounter.

The most significant had to do with handling standard input. There was a call that placed it in blocking mode by default which wreaked odd havoc on Apache after a graceful restart when running PHP/SQLRelay apps.

Full ChangeLog follows...

• file::open sets errno=ENOENT if the file or path wasn't found on Windows now
• fixed a bug with filedescriptor::printf when printing to non-buffered files on Windows and Solaris 11
• fixed a bug that caused a crash in codetree if codeposition is NULL added missing dll export clause to codetreegrammar class
• added xmldomevents class
• added namespace discrimination in codetree::write
• fixed a codetree end-of-string-during-concatenation bug
• fixed a codetree tree reset bug
• fixed an xmlsax bug that caused text nodes with empty values to be inserted between tag nodes when there is no text between tags
• added escapechar option to filedescriptor::read-until-terminator methods
• added a generic securitycontext class and integrated it with filedescriptor
• implemented GSS/SSPI and TLS/SSL children of securitycontext
• removed old SSL integration with filedescriptor
• updated inet/unixsocketclient to close() as the first step of connect()
• updated charstring::to(Unsigned)Integer-with-endptr methods to have const char **endptr arguments
• updated configure script to find erlang on openbsd 5.8
• buffers allocated by vasprintf are free()'ed now rather than deleted
• fixed a commandline bug that could cause it to return the next parameter for getValue() of a parameter with no value
• fixed connect()/useBlockingMode error masking bug
• removed -revision during link and adopted Semantic Versioning 2.0
• added pthread_create/EAGAIN retry
• added methods to configure and examine process::fork and thread::run retry behavior
• thread methods test for invalid thread before operating on it now
• charstring::split doesn't crash if list or listlength are null now
• added debugprint header
• removed problematic thread::cancel() method
• added thread::runDetached() methods
• removed useBlockingMode() call in stdio constructor as is caused problems with apps like Apache that actually need stdin/out/err to be in non-blocking mode sometimes