I am trying to get into C++ programming so apologise if this is a bit of a stupid question.
I am attempting to create a program in C++ that is linked to a website via the database, that's all sorted. In this program, the user must log into it to be able to use its features, I've also managed to do this fine. My question is, what is the best way of storing that users session so I can refer to their username, display that users settings from the database e.c.t?
I am unsure, but I don't think c++ has session options like in php so I cannot do it that way. I did some googling before I posted this, spent all night trying to find a solution, I found nothing.
My knowledge if c++ is slim and this may sound like a more complicated or unnecessary route to take, but it was thinking of perhaps when the user logs in, to create a txt file storing that users username and then calling on it when I need to refer to that users username for queries and such, then when the user logs out or closes the program it deletes the file. Is that stupid? Forgive me if it is.
Is there better way to go about this?
Thanks for your time!
EDIT
I read your comments, if it needs to be a stand-alone application, like some sort of client, you could take a look at the C++ libraries I mentioned, but I'd use any higher level language (Java or C# have good documentation and there are many tutorials for creating GUIs, if that's what your're looking for. I think even Python would make a good candidate).
If you really must use C++, your best bet would be to use an existing library to implement your web solution. POCO includes an HTTP server framework, and a library for sockets and other forms of low-level network programming. Boost ASIO can also serve your purposes. But this is hardly something I'd recommend to start learning programming, or C++ for that matter.
If you want to learn about web programming, then you should definitely take a look at other languages. PHP or ASP.NET come to mind. AS you learn, you'll most likely also end up writing some form of Javascript. You can find a lot of info out there, just Google for tutorials. A site to get started is w3Schools, but any site with tutorials will do. Good luck!
Related
I am new to network programming and got started with boost, REST etc. I wanted to know if I could use REST API's with boost-asio such as using Google Maps' Distance Matrix in my program. But I couldn't find a proper documentation for boost.
I don't expect you to give me complete working code rather I need idea or some sort of guidance as to what to do, where to find things etc.Also this program will be in C++ purely (I don't know if it can even be done in C++, given this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/28736632/4846740). Thanks
Note: This post was not very helpful Integrating Google maps with C++ Program
You'd want to
use a REST library (e.g. cpprestsdk or some other frameworks like autobahn-cpp?), or
= at least write the REST requests on top of a HTTP library, such as Boost Beast
The library examples show you everything you need to send requests and receive responses. If you want, you can use additional libraries like https://github.com/0xdead4ead/BeastHttp to make it even more high-level/instant.
I would 100% recommend that you do not do this in C++. While I'm not a huge fan of Python, it's undoubtedly the hammer that is made for this nail. Check out BeautifulSoup, Mechanize, and Scrapy (+XPath), for really convenient ways of obtaining/parsing HTML, filling out web forms, and gaining responses. Typically, unless you're doing realtime target tracking, you do not need the latency gained from running everything in C/C++. You can get away with quarter-second, or even half-second updates.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but I would say save yourself the headache, and just work with Python.
I am using Ember 3.0 at the moment. Wrote my first lines of code in ANY language about 1 year ago (I switched careers from something totally unrelated to development), but I quickly took to ember. So, not a ton of experience, but not none. I am writing a multi-tenant site which will include about 20 different sites, all with one Ember frontend and a RubyOnRails backend. I am about 75% done with the front end, now just loading content into it. I haven’t started on the backend yet, one, because I don’t have MUCH experience with backend stuff, and two, because I haven’t needed it yet. My sites will be informational to begin with and I’ll build it up from there.
So. I am trying to implement a news feed on my site. I need it to pull in multiple rss feeds, perhaps dozens, filtered by keyword, and display them on my site. I’ve been scouring the web for days just trying to figure out where to get started. I was thinking of writing a service that parses the incoming xml, I tried using a third party widget (which I DON’T really want to do. Everything on my site so far has been built from scratch and I’d like to keep it that way), but in using these third party systems I get some random cross domain errors and node-child errors which only SOMETIMES pop up. Anyway, I’d like to write this myself, if possible, since I’m trying to learn (and my brain is wired to do the code myself - the only way it sticks with me).
Ultimately, every google result I read says RSS feeds are easy to implement. I don’t know where I’m going wrong, but I’m simply looking for:
1: An “Ember-way” starting point. 2: Is this possible without a backend? 3: Do I have to use a third party widget/aggregator? 4: Whatever else you think might help on the subject.
Any help would be appreciated. Here in New Hampshire, there are basically no resources, no meetings, nothing. Thanks for any help.
Based on the results I get back when searching on this topic, it looks like you’ll get a few snags if you try to do this in the browser:
CORS header issues (sounds like you’ve already hit this)
The joy of working with XML in JavaScript (that just might be sarcasm 😉, it’s actually unlikely to be fun)
If your goal is to do this as a learning exercise, then doing it Javascript/Ember will definitely help you learn lots of new things. You might start with this article as a jumping off point: https://www.raymondcamden.com/2015/12/08/parsing-rss-feeds-in-javascript-options/
However, if you want to have this be maintainable for the long run and want things to go quickly and smoothly, I would highly recommend moving the RSS parsing system into your backend and feeding simple data out to Ember. There are enough gotchas and complexities to RSS feeds over time that using a battle-tested library is going to be your best way to stay sane. And loading that type of library up in Ember (while quite doable) will end up increasing your application size. You will avoid all those snags (and more I’m probably not thinking of) if you move your parsing back to the server ...
Is there a relatively easy way to display the output of a C++ program on a webpage? And I don't mean manually, in other words, you see it on a webpage as it runs not as in I make a code tag and write it in myself.
EDIT: Just so everybody can get this clear I am going to post this up here. I am NOT trying to make a webpage in C++. Please excuse me if this sounds spiteful or anything but I am getting a lot of answers relating to that.
Step one, get yourself a server-side language. Be that PHP, ASP, Python, Ruby, whatever. Get it set up so you can serve it.
Step two, find your language's exec equivalent. Practically all of them have them. It'll let you run a command as if it were from the command line, usually with arguments and capture the output. Here's PHP's:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
Of course, if you're passing user-input as arguments, sanitise!
I've just seen that you accepted Scott's answer. I usually wouldn't chase up a SO thread so persistently but I fear you're about to make a mistake that you'll come to regret down the line. Giving direct access to your program and its own built-in server is a terrible idea for two reasons:
You waste a day implementing this built-in server and then getting it to persist and testing it
More importantly, you've just opened up another attack vector into your server. When it comes to security, keep it simple.
You're far better having your C++ app running behind another (mature) server side language as all the work is done for you and it can filter the input to keep things safe.
You could write a CGI app in C++, or you could use an existing web server language to execute the command and send the output to the client.
You want to use Witty.
Wt (pronounced 'witty') is a C++
library for developing interactive web
applications.
The API is widget-centric and similar
to desktop GUI APIs. To the developer,
it offers complete abstraction of any
web-specific implementation details,
including event handling, graphics
support, graceful degradation (or
progressive enhancement), and pretty
URLs.
Unlike many page-based frameworks, Wt
was designed for creating stateful
applications that are at the same time
highly interactive (leveraging
techinques such as AJAX to their
fullest) and accessible (supporting
plain HTML browsers), using automatic
graceful degradation or progressive
enhancement.
The library comes with an application
server that acts as a stand-alone web
server or integrates through FastCGI
with other web servers.
I am not sure this is what you are looking for but you may want CGI You may want to look at this SO question, C++ may not be the best language for what you want to do.
based off the questions you posted Writing a web app like what you want is no simple task. What I would recommend is use some other library (this is one i found with a quick google) to get a web console on your server and give the user it is running under execute deny permissions on every folder except the folder you have your app installed.
This is still is a risky method if you don't set up the security correctly but it is the easiest solution without digging around too much on existing libraries to just have the application interactive.
EDIT --
The "Best" solution is learn AJAX and have your program post its own pages with it but like I said, it will not be easy.
It sounds like you want something like a telnet session embedded in a webpage. A quick google turns up many Java telnet apps, though I'm not qualified to evaluate which would be most ideal to embed in html.
You would set up the login script on the host machine to run your c++ app and the user would interact with it through the shell window. Note though that this will only work for pure command line apps. If you want to use a GUI app in this way, then you should look into remote desktop software or VNC.
It may be worth looking into Adobe's "Alchemy" project on Adobe Labs
This may help you with what you're trying to achieve.
:)
Are you looking for something like what codepad.org does? I believe they explain how they did it here.
There is a library called C++ Server Pages - Poco. I used it for one of my college project, its pretty good. There is also good documentation to get started with, u can find it here http://pocoproject.org/docs/
I have a few years experience programming c++ and a little less then that using Qt. I built a data mining software using Qt and I want to make it available online. Unfortunately, I know close to nothing about web programming. Firstly, how easy or hard is this to do and what is the best way to go about it?
Supposing I am looking to hire someone to make me a secure, long-term, extensible, website for an online software service, what skill set should I be looking for?
Edit:
I want to make my question a little more specific:
How can I take a bunch of working c++ functions and port the code so I can run it server side on a website?
Once this is done, would it be easy to make changes to the c++ code and have the algorithm automatically update on the site?
What technologies would be involved? Are there any cloud computing platforms that would be good for something like this?
#Niklaos-what does it mean to build a library and how does one do that?
You might want to have a look at Wt[1]. Its a C++ web framework which is programmed more or less like a desktop GUI application. One of the use cases quoted is to bring legacy apps into the web.
[1] http://www.webtoolkit.eu
Port the functions to Java, easily done from C++, you can even find some tools to help - don't trust them implicitly but they could provide a boost.
See longer answer below.
Wrap them in a web application, and deploy them on Google App-Engine.
Java version of a library would be a jar file.
If you really want to be able to update the algorithm implementation dynamically, then you could implement them in Groovy, and upload changes through a form on your webapp, either as files or as a big text block, need to consider version control.
The effort/skillset involved to perform the task depends on how your wrote your code. If it is in a self-contained library, and has a clean (re-entrant, thread safe) API, you could probably hire a web developer (html/php/asp etc) to write the UI interface to the library for a relatively small cost. The skills required would be dependant on the technologies you wanted to use. For Windows development I would suggest C#/ASP. The applicant would require knowledge of interfacing with native libraries from a managed language. This is assuming that you dont mind the costs of Windows deployment for your application.
On the otherhand, if the library is complex or needs to be re-written to support the extensibility you are looking for, asking here will not get you much.
BTW: here is a great article on Marshalling if you chose to implement using C#/ASP
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164193.aspx
First, DO NOT USE PHP :D
I used it for some projects (the last one with symphony framework) and i almost shoot my self !
If you are very familiar with C++, ASP .NET could be a good solution because if you like C++ you are going to love C#.
Any ways, I personally use Ruby on Rails for 6 months now and I LOVE IT. I won't write you a book here but the framework is pure gold !
The only problem is that Ruby is a very special language. You will probably be a bit lost a the beginning. But as every one you will learn to love it.
But that was only for the server side. Indeed, there 3 technologies you won't be able to avoid if you want to start to develop web applications.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript are presents every where. This is why i'm thinking you should start by HTML and CSS then JavaScript (with jQuery).
When you've got some basics with these 3 technologies you should be able to choose the server side language.
But you've got to tell you one thing, it's not going to be easy !
PS : Ruby on Rails uses HAML and SASS. These 2 languages replaces HTML and CSS you should have a look at them quickly because they are awesome.
Currently I'm using DokuWiki to manage my apps/scripts documentation, some articles I write and stuff like that... I like DokuWiki very much, it's simple and powerful but it's still too much for the use I've given it in the last 1/2 years.
I need something else, something different...
I'm looking for a way to integrate the little things I like in DokuWiki into my own website without needing a script, like DokuWiki, with it's own admin page. The website itself, my homepage, I like to code myself most of the things so it becomes exactly what I want. However, somethings I don't have much time for, that is why I'm using DokuWiki.
I want to ditch DokuWiki and scripts like these because I don't even use half of their capabilities. A wiki is a platform where people join their efforts and collaborate together to write stuff, it also has a revision system. These are two very important aspects about wikis that I don't care about for my own. I'm the only one writing stuff there and I don't care about revisions, never needed them.
What I like about DokuWiki is that I can point my browser to any URL within the wiki domain and create a page from there if it doesn't exist. I also like DokuWiki's syntax very much but sometimes it's very limited and I can't do what I want. The way you link between namespaces and such is also very nice. Too finish, a media/file manager is also very handy. These are probably the most important aspects for me in DokuWiki.
Basically, I'm looking for something, maybe a script, that would allow me to do the stuff I described above in a way I could integrate into my own website without needing a special administration area.
Does anyone know about such thing or I'm better off coding my own since my requirements are not that tricky to begin with, I just didn't want to have the extra work...
Or maybe any other suggestions?
Maybe you'll want to have a look at something like TiddlyWiki, which is a single-file wiki, that you can even put on a USB stick.
I chose xwiki over dokuwiki.
Another simple wiki is the one included with fogbugz. It is hosted for free for up to 2 users and might suit your project.
I may be off but very simple wiki with no administration and no users is LionWiki. I don't know how easy it's gonna be to integrate it into your website.
It's just one file and does not use database (like DokuWiki).
It does not have a lot of features though. It also uses a different syntax from that of DokuWiki.