I am looking for an alternative to gSoap / Axis C to create a C++ soap client. So far I haven't been able to find anything other then those two projects. gSoap's license it a little too restrictive while Axis seems just about abandoned.
I also detect a generate trend in the industry away from SOAP towards REST which I battle to understand. SOAP makes so many things a lot easier while rest seems very pedestrian. Are there any elegant frameworks which let you do REST in an object oriented way in C/C++?
It's old, but it works: SPROXY.EXE.
SPROXY.EXE is a command line tool that generates native C++ client code for accessing an XML Web service based on a WSDL description.
It's open source, you can get it from CodePlex.
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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 have a some web services that my app needs to communicate with by sending json with REST over HTTP POST/GET. The only way I can see to do this is with the iXMLHTTPRequest2 framework but geeze oh man is it uglier than I want to deal with.
Is this the only option I have to look at with c++?
Would this be easier with c#? I know most of the things are the same across the languages, but if c# has a better way to do this, I'd be willing to make the jump.
You should also look into Project Casablanca - it's a fully native C++ library that also is adapted for use with Metro apps (I believe it wraps IXHR2). I've been using it to perform http REST calls and to parse JSON very successfully.
That's the interface you have to use in C++. It is more difficult than in C#. Given that, there is a good sample that will make using that interface a bit more bearable.
When providing a web services API (well, let's say SOAP), do you provide a library wrapper along with it to make it "easier" for people to use? Or do you just package up a WSDL and documentation for it and let people figure out what to do with it?
What are people doing usually? I've seen a bunch of examples where the wrapper is provided, but it has always seemed counter-productive to me.
WSDL is easily discoverable (all functions & types as declared), so there is usually no need to offer any package with it, and minimal documentation (apply an XSL to the WDSL and it's usually enough :) ). My theory about the appearance of libraries/wrappers is that it is directly related to security measures / needed authentication & hashes (usually: concatenating some fields with a secret & hash it), about which one simply doesn't want to answer every single question anymore.
Audience matters I think: if you want you run-of-the-mill hobby coder to be able to use your service, providing a package can get you that much more users. If you're more in business to business services, the webservice usually has to be integrated in some larger package and most libraries would be futile.
That being said, I'd say of the webservices I came across: about 60% of the libraries provided were hopeless spaghetti code fit for the bin, 30% were not the code I'd use, but could clear up some questions not answered by the documentation, and only about 10% were fit enough to integrate in a project (or the project small and/or worse enough to be no worse for it).
How you going to support multiple web-service stacks - JAX-WS, AXIS2, CXF etc? My choice - WSDL/XSD. In practice I got service built with JAX-WS and a client with AXIS2. And I don't want to build a client wich you are going to use. I don't even know your preferable web-service stack and your JVM version limitations. For example, I can call web-service from java 1.4 - there are no annotations and not possible to use client lib built with annotations for java 1.5. So WSDL is right way to build ws-client instead of providing generated client library.
Does anyone know of any really good C++ Libraries for implementing a web services api over top of existing legacy code?
I've got two portions that are in need of it:
An old-school client/server api (No, not web based, that's the problem)
An old cgi application that it integrates with the client and server.
Let me know if you've had any luck in the past implementing something like this using the library.
Microsoft has put out native code webservices API (WWSAPI) that looks pretty decent. I haven't had a chance to use it yet. We had originally ignored it, since it required Windows 7 or Server 2008, but they've finally released a runtime library for older OSs.
I would advise staying away from Microsoft's old SOAP SDK. For one, it's been deprecated; two, it's not terribly easy to distribute; and three, it's terrible to code for compared to the .NET offerings.
What we've done is written a bit of C++\CLI to interface our existing C++ codebase with .NETs webservice framework. This turned out to be remarkably easy. .NET will generate all the classes and boilerplate code you need based of of a WSDL file. Then you just write some C++\CLI code to handle the incoming data as managed classes and fill in some managed classes as responses.
You can use the Apache AXIS/C interface to build a web services interface. It has plugins for Apache and IIS (and I think FastCGI), and lets you talk web services to your legacy code.
I used gSOAP in a project and it was quite straightforward. Compared to Axis/C, I found it easier to learn and use. I never used POCO, can't give you an opinion, but it's gaining popularity recently. This is the link for gSOAP
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/soap.html
My project is about to introduce SOAP. It's going to be used for C++ <-> Java and C++ <-> Flex communication. I'm responsible for refactoring our apps to take advantage of Java business rules engine and new Flex gui.
What resources are must read for C++ SOAP? I've read W3 materials. We're probably be using gSOAP on Solaris boxes.
There are some reasonably good books on SOAP, like Programming Web Services with SOAP by Snell, Tidwell, and Kulchenko; I've given that to people to introduce them to SOAP on projects in the past. I don't know of a C++-specific book, but the gSOAP site has pretty decent documentation.
I think the really key thing is probably to not dive into a complicated project right at first; there are some SOAP tutorials around, like this one, that build simple web services using gSOAP. Get the SOAP version of "Hello, world!" going firt, then maybe build that eBay client in the example, and you'll learn a lot of things you'd learn much more slowly and painfully trying to build a big example first.
Another option is to not use SOAP. Have you considered something like Protocol Buffers or Thrift?