1. Introduction

All symbols defined in the public API start with MHD_. MHD is a small HTTP daemon library. As such, it does not have any API for logging errors (you can only enable or disable logging to stderr). Also, it may not support all of the HTTP features directly, where applicable, portions of HTTP may have to be handled by clients of the library.

The library is supposed to handle everything that it must handle (because the API would not allow clients to do this), such as basic connection management; however, detailed interpretations of headers — such as range requests — and HTTP methods are left to clients. The library does understand HEAD and will only send the headers of the response and not the body, even if the client supplied a body. The library also understands headers that control connection management (specifically, Connection: close and Expect: 100 continue are understood and handled automatically).

MHD understands POST data and is able to decode certain formats (at the moment only application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data) using the post processor API. The data stream of a POST is also provided directly to the main application, so unsupported encodings could still be processed, just not conveniently by MHD.

The header file defines various constants used by the HTTP protocol. This does not mean that MHD actually interprets all of these values. The provided constants are exported as a convenience for users of the library. MHD does not verify that transmitted HTTP headers are part of the standard specification; users of the library are free to define their own extensions of the HTTP standard and use those with MHD.

All functions are guaranteed to be completely reentrant and thread-safe. MHD checks for allocation failures and tries to recover gracefully (for example, by closing the connection). Additionally, clients can specify resource limits on the overall number of connections, number of connections per IP address and memory used per connection to avoid resource exhaustion.

This document was generated by Christian Grothoff on May, 26 2008 using texi2html 1.78.