In developing FastCGI applications and the  libfcgi2.dll  library, we found the Aprelium Abyss Web Server to be a very valuable tool for the folowing reasons:

• Its FREE!
• If you purchase the Professional edition you get 1 year access to support (well worth it)
• Abyss can run on your local machine under most OS's (NT/XP/Vista/LINUX/MAC)
  
• You can create application debug files in the same directory as the FastCGI application (unlike cgi-bin)
• Detail level of Debugging available
  

On the face of it, these seem like simple features, but the amount of time they save in developing and testing cannot be underestimated!

For example, if you are developing FastCGI applications for deployment on a Windows IIS server for example, and you are not sitting at the server (most likely) then each time you compile you need to transfer the binary to the server, and then recover the debug spew for examination. Just those two steps become very tiresome very quickly even with a tool like VNC.

This library was developed to specifically support IIS and Abyss so that FastCGI application testing is faster. It also helps in tracking down Web Server specific issues and errors.

Abyss provides two levels of debugging


1. Installing Abyss

I did not install it as a windows service, on demand works just fine.




2. Configuring Abyss
To configure Abyss for FastCGI Applications is easy with their intuitive web management interface called the console.
(which makes the web server configuration like browsing a web site)