What is a good choice for a simple http Server lib? It doesn't need high performance. I rather look for something simple for some REST/JSON communication ("API").
It must be able though to work in a multithreaded environment and must be able to handle large POST request.
Any suggestions? I already tried cpp-netlib but this seems to be much too complicated for such an easy task...
Edit: I am looking for something really light-weight and simple. E.g. like Sinatra in the Ruby world. Poco is for me another example of a too heavy-weight library.
The first one that comes to mind is Poco Library ( http://pocoproject.org/ )
Cross platform, stable, well documented. While the library itself offers more than you probably need you can build and omit the portions you aren't planning on using to reduce bloat.
They have a fully featured Net library that includes several salient classes and utilities.
Here is a pdf of slides from that library, of particular interest is the HTTPServer class:
http://pocoproject.org/slides/200-Network.pdf
Not sure about large POST data, but I've previously used mongoose: https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose/.
If the LGPL license is unwanted there is a MIT fork from when the project was MIT that also add a C++ API https://github.com/bel2125/civetweb
I would encourage you to start with http server samples in boost.asio. They are so simple and easy to understand, that you should be able to easily extend them as needed.
However, if you want to jump onto something more polished than just sample code, I know of 3 http servers in C++ which you may like to try:
"x0 - HTTP Web Server Framework" to me personally this one seems most promising, because it's lightweight and simple
"highpower / xiva" is a simple http server framework for delivering notifications to browsers
"Pion, a project of Atomic Labs" is a part of elaborate framework for handling large amounts of data
Pretty late answer; but hope this helps.
For your interest of a server that can handle REST, here is the easiest HTTP Server library to use (in my opinion): https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib.
For JSON parsing, you may search for another library to use it in conjunction.
Personally, I'd go for Arachnida but that might be because I wrote it.
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 building a server-client application that involves heavy signal processing (e.g. FFT). I have a working application written in C++/Qt, where everything (signal processing and other calculations) is done in client and server just sends raw data. Now I feel it would be easier to implement these features on the server. So, that maintenance becomes easier.
As I am doing signal processing, I think I should stick to C++ for performance. But I am open to new ideas.
Constraints:
I need type checking so javascript is out of discussion.
Scaling includes adding more server and each server will have at the max
10-12 users. So, Hardware cost is important. I cannot use x number of
i7 processors.
No option of using cloud services.
So, right now my question is as follows:
How can I create web services using C++ for Linux server? (Although cross platform is not important, I would appreciate if I can achieve it.)
EDIT [02:09:2015]
Right now, I think the choice is between poco and C++ Rest SDK. I feel I should go for C++ Rest SDK. Mainly because it has only those features that I need. And Also it is supported by microsoft and uses boost internally. So, I feel in future, this might be well integreated with standard.
You could use cross-platform Poco library to implement HTTP server, it is really straightforward with this framework, and they have a lot of examples. You can also use JSON serialization (like rapidjson library) to implement REST service on top of HTTP - this way your Web service will be accesable by most of the modern Web frameworks.
You might want to take a look at the C++ Rest SDK, an open source, cross platform API from Microsoft.
Like #nogard suggested, I also recommend POCO for now. It's the most serious and feature-full solution. Given you mentioned Qt, I suggest you to take a look at Tufão.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention one comparison of mine on the C++ HTTP server frameworks.
If you directly handle HTTP requests, you might loose the functionality what Web Servers does well what it was build to do. I had a similar issue, what I did was wrap up my Qt c++ code inside a PHP extension. In your case you can do the same. Wrap your logic inside what ever technology you are about to use, doesn't matter it's PHP, net , Java or anything else.
I was told I have to use winsock, but I dont know where to start. For example, I am trying to access, lets say http://www.newegg.com/, I am trying to get the text title of just the three front page products. Any help is greatly appreciated. :D
I'd also recommend libcurl for this sort of thing.
You can use the cURL command line tool to generate sample code as well, which is helpful for experimentation.
W3.org themselves provide sample C / C++ librarys for Http requests.
Find them here
Specifically, look for HTTPReq.c
Use boost library and poco. They both provide solutions for network programming. Boost also provide spirit library which you can use for parsing data from websites. Poco libraru also provides NetSSL, crypto solutions.
P.S. boost::spirit is not a library for parsing data from websites, it provides solution for parsing strings ...
you need to open a socket.
then you need to do an http get
somewhat like :-
http://www.esqsoft.com/examples/troubleshooting-http-using-telnet.htm
You could use the QNetworkAccessmanager class from Qt framework.
I'm assuming you need to use c++ for a reason, such as integration with existing software, otherwise, as per some of the other suggestions, choosing a language with a more convenient framework (eg: scripting language) would be better suited for the task.
If you would like to avoid getting your hands dirty with WINSOCK, or have the need to run on a platform other than windows, you could look at the using the boost asio library.
The following page contains links to simple sync and async http clients:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_37_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples.html
You can find documentation on the library itself at:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_37_0/doc/html/boost_asio.html
Use c++ if you must, but it might be a lot less painful to use python.
Look at the Python httplib module for how to set the host you want to pull from etc. Python's available for free for most platforms and is enough like C++ that you can probably learn python a heck of a lot faster than you can learn to write a program controlled browser in c++. Well, maybe that's not true for everyone on this site, but I'll bet it's true for "most" of us. I used to get stock quotes updated in near real time from CNN Money years ago and IIRC it was around 100 lines of python code.
Hotei
I want to create a web application that runs with very little RAM and I think C++ can help me achieve that.
Now, many people say C++ is unsuited for web development because:
there is no easy string manipulation
is an unsafe language (overflows, etc)
long change / build / test cycles
etc.
But I'm sure the C++ community have found ways to alleviate all those (maybe not the compile time) however since I'm not a regular so it is hard for me to put a value on what I find in Google.
So I'm asking for some guidance. I would appreciate if you share what works, what tools/libs are current and alive. What strategies can help with web dev in C++? FastCGI or embedded server (Asio / POCO / Pion / etc.)? How do you address security concerns?
Thanks a lot for any help
Have you looked at http://www.tntnet.org/. They have created a... well let me cut and paste from their website:
Tntnet is a modular, multithreaded,
high performance webapplicationserver
for C++. To create webapplications
Tntnet has a template-language called
ecpp similar to php, jsp or mason,
where you can embed c++-code inside a
html-page to generate active content.
The ecpp-files are precompiled to
c++-classes called components and
compiled and linked into a shared
library. This process is done at
compiletime.
I've used it and it has quite a small overhead plus it has screamingly fast dynamic page generation. Makes PHP, Ruby etc snails in comparison because with tntnet you are running compiled C/C++ code.
There's the Wt Project. It uses a paradigm similar to Qt's signals/slots.
There is nothing wrong with trying to build a web app in C++. It's actually a lot of fun. What you need is a:
Templating system
A CGI lib
A database API wrapper, most likely, to avoid dealing with something like the low-level MySQL API
A logger
ATL Server is a library of C++ classes that allow developers to build internet based applications.
ATL Server. It's open source too! And of course there is always ISAPI. Ah, the bad old days. :)
In your other question you mention that your embedded system is openwrt. As this router firmware already comes with a embedded web server (for it's administration UI), why don't you use that for you app as well?
Our web app backend is in C++ via CGI and we use Clearsilver templates along with the HDF that comes with it.
Give us some more hints about what you're trying to do.
You can write a good old-fashioned cgi program in C++ easily enough, and run it with FastCGI. We used to do that all the time.
You could write a C++ program embedding a lightweight HTTP server as well.
Both of them are much bigger PITAs than using something like perl or ruby.
So for why C++?
Update
Okay, got it. The main thing about FastCGI is that it avoids a fork-exec to run your CGI program, but it is a little bit different API. That's good, but you still have the problem of handling the HTTP stuff.
There are, however, several very lightweight HTTP servers, like Cherokee and Lighttpd. In similar situations (building web interfaces for appliances) I've seen people use one of these and run their C/C++ programs under them as a CGI. Lighttpd in particular seems to concentrate on making CGI-like stuff fast and efficient.
Another update. I just had cgicc pointed out to me: http://www.gnu.org/software/cgicc/
That might solve some problems.
You can try Cutelyst a C++11 built with Qt, with one of the best positions on TechEmpower Benchmarks.
Even though it requires Qt 5.6+ a full CMS (CMlyst) uses around 6MB of RAM while serving around 3000 requests per seconds on a single core.
And for your string manipulation issue QString is just an amazing class for that.
I have recently been given a task to add the ability to interact with Web Map Services to an existing MFC application and I am in need of a client-side HTTP API.
Based on my research, the leading candidates seem to be CAtlHttpClient and WinHTTP. I was curious to see if anyone had experiences they could share or opinions on which would be the better way to go (or suggestions for something else entirely).
At first glance, CAtlHttpClient seems to be a bit higher level and easier to use. However, in my research it seemed that any time people had a problem with not being able to do something with it, the answer was "use WinHTTP".
Result
I wound up using WinHTTP because WinInet displays dialog boxes and our application is usable through a COM API. I avoided Ultimate TCP/IP because I work for a large company and getting third party software approved for use in a product is a complete nightmare.
The simplest one is the WinInet MFC wrappers: CInternetSession and friends.
WinHTTP, although a different API, is built on the same model as WinInet yet provides better HTTP support (no FTP though but you probably don't care). Whether you need the extra goodies provided by WinHTTP should be examined.
A down side of WinHTTP is that ATL/MFC don't provide wrappers for it, as opposed to WinInet.
And as Rob mentioned, UltimateTCP is a excellent alternative. One of its advantages is that it's a library: you link the code into your application, thereby eliminating DLL hell potential problems. Also, it comes with full source code which might be convenient if you run into a limitation of the implementation.
Make your pick!
Try Ultimate TCP/IP available for free from here:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/MFC/UltimateTCPIP.aspx
It's a very good library and very easy to integrate with your apps.