I'm trying to write a C++ command line program for peer-to-peer file transfer. My idea is to establish a connection with another machine, and send file data directly. My target platform is Windows, but interoperability with Linux and MacOS would be nice. I want this program to be standalone and not require a web browser.
I did some research and it seems that WebRTC would fit the bill, but I can't find much information on using it with C++.
Is it possible to build a standalone executable that utilizes WebRTC without requiring users to download any dependencies in order to use my program?
As the name suggests - to have the "RTC", it requires "Web" component, either in form of browser or a library.
The C++ library is quite huge and it's not a trivial task to understand and write it in a short period. Browser provides APIs in form of JavaScript calls, which are relatively easier to implement.
There might be commercial APIs in C++ available over internet.
Related
I am trying to create a signal/textsecure client using qt and C++, however i cant seem to fibd any C++ bindings for it.
the only bindings i can find are for Go (https://github.com/nanu-c/textsecure/)
is there any way to connect C++ with signal?
edit:
i wanted to clarify some things:
-im talking about the messaging app called Signal (https://signal.org)
-i am trying to write an app for ubuntu touch and am developing on manjaro linux.
On Linux or Unix, you probably want to communicate with other remote applications using some communication protocol, such as HTTP or HTTPS or SOAP or JSONRPC or ONCRPC. Of course read about socket(7) and before that Advanced Linux Programming then about syscalls(2). Consider reading a textbook on Operating Systems
Be sure to study the source code related to Signal. Read their technical documentation.
You surely need to understand the details. So take a few days or weeks to read more about them.
If you want to use some web service, you need to read and understand its documentation and when and how you are allowed to use it. There could be legal or financial issues.
Then you might use HTTP related libraries (e.g. Wt or libonion server side, and libcurl or curlpp client side).
See also in April 2020 the ongoing HelpCovid free software project (for Linux), at least for inspiration. We are coding it in C++.
after a little more digging i found that textsecure bindings are now renamed to libsignal.
after finding that out i found a lib for c/c++
https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal-protocol-c
Is it possible to use a Go API in a Qt C++ project?
I would like to use the following Google API written in Go: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/reference/libraries#client-libraries-install-go
Is it possible to use a Go API in a Qt C++ project?
It could be possible, but it might not be easy and would be very brittle to run Go and Qt code in the same process, since Go and Qt have very different thread (goroutine) and memory models.
However, Go has (in its standard library) many powerful packages to ease the development of server programs, in particular of HTTP or JSONRPC servers.
Perhaps you might consider running two different processes using inter-process communication facilities. Details are operating system specific. I assume you run Linux. Your Qt application could then start the Go program using QProcess and later communicate with it (behaving as a client to your Go specialized "server"-like program).
Then you could use HTTP or JSONRPC to remotely call your Go functions from your Qt application. You need some HTTP client library in Qt (it is there already under Qt Network, and you might also use libcurl) or some JSONRPC client library. Your Go program would be some specialized HTTP or JSONRPC server (and some Google Speech to Text client) and your Qt program would be its only client (and would start it). So your Go program would be some specialized proxy. You could even use pipe(7)-s, unix(7) sockets, or fifo(7)-s to increase the "privacy" of the communication channel.
If the Google Speech to Text API is huge (but it probably is not) you might use Go reflective or introspective abilities to generate some C++ glue code for Qt: go/ast, go/build, go/parser, go/importer, etc
BTW, it seems that Google Speech to Text protocol is using JSON with HTTP (it seems to be some Web API) and has a documented REST API, so you might directly code in C++ the relevant code doing that (of course you need to understand all the details of the protocol: relevant HTTP requests and JSON formats), without any Go code (or process). If you go that route, I recommend making your Qt (or C++) code for Google Speech to Text some separate free software library (to be able to get feedback and help from outside).
I am writing an application using Qt and want to try and deploy it as a web-application. I want user's to be able to use my application by accessing it through a web browser. I'm guessing that's what a web-application is? What kind of options do I have? I've never looked into doing anything like this but I'd like to learn something new.
EDIT: What if I deployed my application on a Linux server and had users access/run it through a terminal? I think writing web application is going to be more complicated than I had originally thought.
If all you have is a Qt application, then the best you can do is use Qt 5 and run it using a remote visualization package:
Use WebGL streaming, introduced in Qt 5.10. Qt exposes a browser-connectible interface directly, without need for third-party code.
For Qt 5.0-5.9, you can use the vnc platform plugin. Then connect using a web-browser based vnc client.
For many uses it might be sufficient, and certainly it's much less effort than coding up a web app.
You're looking for Wt which provides a different set of drawing routines for many Qt GUI elements, turning them from lines on screen to HTML controls.
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
It also handles websocket calls to provide interactivity. It seems a great idea, let us know how it works in practice.
For the case of QML there is QmlWeb which is a JavaScript library that is able to parse QML-code and create a website out of it using normal HTML/DOM elements and absolute positions within CSS, translating the QML properties into CSS properties.
QmlWeb is a small project by Lauri Paimen that he’s already developing for a few years now. QmlWeb of course doesn’t yet support everything Qt’s implementation of QML does, but it already supports a quite usable subset of it. It supports nearly all of the most basic QML syntax. Moreover it has support for HTML input elements (Button, TextInput, TextArea are currently supported, more to come).
Well, QmlWeb is not finished. I hope Digia help with this project to make it ready with mature features.
Interestingly, it is possible to compile Qt applications to javascript using emscripten-qt. These run fairly fast with Firefox's asm.js interpreter:
http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki
Try "Qt for Webassembly".
Webassembly allows the C/C++ code to be compiled and run natively inside majority of the browsers:
WebAssembly (Wasm, WA) is a web standard that defines a binary format and a corresponding assembly-like text format for executable code in Web pages. ... It is executed in a sandbox in the web browser after a verification step. Programs can be compiled from high-level languages into Wasm modules and loaded as libraries from within JavaScript applets ... Its initial aim is to support compilation from C and C++, though support for other source languages such as Rust and .NET languages is also emerging.
To run a Qt application unchanged over the web so users can operate it in a browser, you can compile it for Android using the x86 Android ABI, run it inside an Android emulator on a server and supply the Android Cast videostream to users' browsers. You'll also need to have JavaScript in place that records the keyboard and mouse events on the web clients and relays them back to the server.
I had previously tried Qt WebGL streaming and found it to be good over the local network but too slow over the Internet. A 10 s application startup time is acceptable, but 3 s to show a new screen is rather not. I had the exact same experience with the Qt VNC platform plugin. Compared with that, the Android Cast streaming based appetize.io solution (see below) was much faster, providing a well usable user experience even over my 8 Mbit/s connection.
Existing solutions
Here is an overview of commercial products and open source software components that I found that can help you with this approach:
appetize.io. This is a commercial product to run Android applications over the web for demo and testing purposes. I have just done this with a Qt QML based application and liked the outcome. When choosing an Android 9 / 10 device you can see that the "Screencast" setting is on; which is why I believe that this solution uses the Android Cast technology.
runthatapp.com. This is another commercial offer. Not as sophisticated (yet) as appetize.io, but providing a nice pay-as-you-go scheme.
ScreenStream. An open source Android app that provides a web server to view the screen of one Android device in a web browser, also relying on the Android Cast technology. That Android device could be an emulator running on a web server. And to make this multi-user capable you can employ a small load balancer similar to a technique that I developed for Qt WebGL streaming. The ScreenStream README shows that the application might consume up to 20 Mbit/s per client in short bursts.
Ideas for future improvements
Serving your Qt app as an interactive live video stream seems a promising idea to me, given that I found it already less sluggish than VNC and similar solutions. There are ways to make this even faster, such as using a hardware H.265 video encoder to create a video stream with very little delay. By operating multiple such encoders on a single server, the server could serve multiple clients and still keep its CPU load low. Maybe there are even better video formats for such a purpose, given that user interfaces of programs lend themselves well to lossless compression.
Some hints for appetize.io
Finally: since I used the appetize.io product for a Qt application over the last few days, here are some tips from that experience:
It is necessary to compile your Qt application for the x86 Android ABI. The default armeabi-v7a ABI will not work because most appetize.io devices are actually server-based Android emulators and the only ARM based device ("Nexus 5 Physical") failed to start any Qt application I tried to use with it.
The x86_64 ABI may also work, but you might then have to also compile Qt yourself for it, as not all versions of Qt come pre-compiled for that architecture.
All appetize.io links (both for standalone pages and embeddable iframes) support GET parameters to configure the app presentation format. Especially relevant here is screenOnly=true to show the app without a picture of a phone or tablet around it.
Features that rely on phone hardware (camera, position etc.) will not work or only show dummy data. But if you really wanted, you could create a hybrid application combined with client-side JavaScript. It would run device-dependent code in the user's browser, for example to take a photo with the webcam, and then provide the results to the Qt application via the appetize.io cross-document messaging protocol. The following message types seem suitable to build a simple communication protocol: pasteText(value), keypress(key, shiftKey) and openUrl(value).
In the default appetize.io standalone app demo pages, only the key events of ordinary letter keys are sent to the app, not keyboard shortcuts or function keys like F2 and Esc. This might be possible to fix with JavaScript on an own page embedding the appetize.io iframe, as their cross-document messaging protocol provides the keypress(key, shiftKey) message type.
Qt does not support writing browser based web applications. Unfortunately.
You need to use common web programming technologies for this. There are a lot of ways, but Qt is not one of them.
Question: What is the best way to make two programs (both running on the same computer) communicate and interact? (Windows, C++)
Theoretical situation:
On a Windows PC, I have a 3rd party software that you use to do stuff (like open/edit/save files...it's not really important). This 3rd party software has an available C++ SDK so you can develop plugins for it.
I develop a separate standalone Windows C++ program (most likely using Qt) with a GUI. This program is made to run on the same Windows computer as the 3rd party software. This program would act as a remote control or sender.
Using the 3rd party software's SDK, I develop a tiny plugin for the 3rd party software. This program acts as a receiver, so that my Qt GUI can send commands that this plugin would receive and thus remote control the 3rd party software accordingly.
So for a basic example, I could press a button on my standalone GUI that would communicate with the plugin that would then open a specified file in the 3rd party software.
What I'm essentially looking for is to develop standalone software that would communicate back and forth with a plugin that I would develop for the 3rd party software.
What is the best approach to this? I really have no clue where to start or what to look at. Are there common C++ libraries that make this type of thing easy?
I'm relatively new to C++ and very new to Qt, so please try to elaborate. Please don't just say "Use Shared Memory" or something like that cause I'm not gonna know exactly what you are talking about.
The program would NOT be run on a separate computer, so no network stuff is necessary here I don't think.
Some questions I was thinking about:
What if user has multiple copies of 3rd party software open at the same time. How does my standalone software know which one to communicate with?
If I already have my standalone software running and open the 3rd party software, does the plugin somehow have to register or find my standalone software to communicate with it?
If I already have the 3rd party software running and then open my standalone software does it have to scan for the plugin to see if its running or how does it find it?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've done a search on the topic on SO but didn't see many questions for C++ specifically and most of them didn't have many answers or weren't very clear or didn't specifically refer to software communication with a plugin for a 3rd party program.
there are many solutions with many pros and cons. you will have to do some reading on each to work out which is best for you. no solution is best for everyone
here is a good starting place http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365574(v=vs.85).aspx
Honestly, I'd most likely take the network-based approach. It decouples the standalone software and the plugin and as such, you could easily hook your plugin into any number of other utility programs or scripts as long as the communication protocol matches.
So, I'd probably develop the plugin to act as a server, receiving commands and responding with statuses (hey, you could even follow the HTTP standard if you really wanted to ;)).
And if you ever wanted to do cross-machine communication, it comes for free :)
Of course, depending on the software and the usage, I'd encrypt the communication.
If you're using Qt, I believe it has the notion of Plugin: How to Create Qt Plugins
Otherwise, COM works fine. With C++ , I would use the ATL library, but there is also COM support in Qt.
If you want to go more low level, I would use sockets or named pipes (since you're working with Windows)
I'd go for sockets to establish a communication between your remote control application and the server app.
You'll find lots and lots of information by searching these keywords here on SO: IPC, RPC, sockets.
I am using persevere for an application I am writing that controls remote hardwere.
Persevere is written in Java and doesn't supply an alternative API.
I am using a web-based GUI as the control panel. So far, so good.
I can get and set data using REST channels like dojo does but the problem is that I don't really know how to use REST channels. Which library should I use to do so?
If you use gcc as your toolchain you can embed a JVM with GCJ to run persevere inside your application. GCJ makes it easy to call C++ from Java with it's CNI interface (much easier than JNI). I used that method to use Java scripting inside our C++ application. You can even compile the persevere jar into a native library and link it to your app with GCJ.
The best reference is the GCJ Documentation.
There is also a Linux Journal contains the article Embedded Java with GCJ that you can read.
You can also study applications that use gcj.