What's New In Version 2?

Here is a list of the major changes between versions 1 and 2 of the Embedded Control Server

Serial Communications (DOS)

The new pppd packet driver allows the server to be connected via a direct serial cable or a modem. There are detailed instructions in the User Guide which describe how to set up serial communications, including how to connect to a PC running Windows 95 using a null modem cable.

Time Slicing (DOS)

Now the performance of the foreground control application running on top of 2netweb can be tuned. The amount of cpu time 2netweb takes up can be set using the maxTimeSlice and minTickGap parameters in 2net.cfg. MaxTickSlice sets the maximum number of 55ms timer ticks the web server will run before suspending. The default is 4. MinTickGap sets the minimum number of 55ms timer ticks before 2netweb resumes following a suspend, default 2.

Remote Control Centre (DOS and Linux)

The Remote Control Centre has been re-modeled using HTML frames and SSI includes to reduce the amount of hard-coded user interface. All language-dependant strings are either in HTML files or in the string resource file, local.str, thus making is easy for OEMs to create localised versions of the RCC.

The range of file manipulation functions has been increased as well.

Files: Upload, Download, Rename and Delete
Directories: Create, Rename and Delete

SSI support (DOS and Linux)

SSI (Server Side Include) is a standard way of telling the server to modify a page before sending it. In version 1.0, the #echo var tag was supported as a means of embedding Control Variables into HTML pages. Now, the include and exec tags are supported as well.

The include tag looks like this:

<!--#include file="path relative to current document" -->

It is used to insert the contents of another HTML file into the current one - useful when the same content must appear in several pages

The exec tag calls a CGI function and inserts its output into the current page. The format of the tag is:

<!--#exec cgi="URL encoded relative path to CGI script" -->

Additional APIs for CGI Functions (DOS and Linux)

There are two new APIs to make CGI programming easier: GetCgiQuery and CgiReplyBuffer.

GetCgiQuery is an easier way to find out when the CGI process has been called. It returns a reference to the CGI query string if there is one, or NULL if not. Now the CGI process only has to call this function on a regular basis to get the CGI request.

CgiReplyBuffer passes the result of the CGI process back to the server in a memory buffer rather than a file, which is faster and avoids problems with creating lots of temporary files.