Are there any tools to run C++ applications written in QT on standard web browsers?
My C++ app has to run from a webpage, do some math, and return the result back to the webpage.
Check out NaCl (Native Client). No Qt, but you can use c++.
You can't. You can write the server side in a web app in C++, of course, but the Qt GUI framework is only for applications that show their user interface on the machine they are running on. (With the usual caveats in the case of remote X11 connections and so forth, but that won't help you for a web app).
I have read about a sample application like this. I think you can search for this term "Qt WebKit Hybrid application". In that example, the user interface is written in HTML and Javascript and the backend in C++. Even, the C++ objects ownerships can be transferred to Javascript. I'm not sure I'm correct but I'm partially correct.
EDIT:
Here is the link.
https://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/Server-Driven_UI_with_Hybrid_QtWebkit
It's possible to compile C++ code to JavaScript using Emscripten, and then call compiled C++ functions from JavaScript, as explained here. This will allow you to run C++ code in a web browser or other JavaScript environment, without any additional plugins.
There is one more solution to this, you can write a browser plugin. I think that this is better then ActiveX and NaCl. For details on how to write plugins check this: How to write a C++ FireFox 3 plugin (not extension) on Windows?
Maybe you could embed the code in an ActiveX control.
Related
Is it possible to write front-end of my application in QML and back-end in C++ and compile it somehow so that I can deploy it to a web-server like Apache or JBoss so that it is accessible from within a web browser ?
If yes, do you have any examples how to perform this ?
Thank you very much for your answers :)
I was trying to find an answer to my question on the Internet but I was not successful.
QmlWeb 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 started primarily by Lauri Paimen who developed it for a few years and is now a KDE project maintained by Anton Kreuzkamp.
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.
The javascript currently sits on top of v8 but serves the purpose of expressing complex bindings and some (preferably small) client logic. But the engine could change (http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/04/15/evolution-of-the-qml-engine-part-1/).
Like in a browser, the actual graphics are kind of orthogonal to javascript which can only interact (or instantiate) with already existing graphical objects. In a browser, the graphics are described by html/css/svg/dom, and interpreted by the web engine written in C++. In QtQuick, the graphics are written in Qml and interpreted by the qml engine (scengraph) written in C++.
The two stacks are completely different.
Exception made of the Html canvas and the Qml canvas (which almost share the same api). But those are graphics working in immediate mode (opposed to a SVG or Qml scenegraph, working in a Retained mode fashion).
That being said...
There are 3 attempts to port Qml to the web:
A Qt port to Google Nacl (never heard of it from a long time, most likely dead)
Qt port through Emscripten/asm.js (awesome project, but not viable for production, and I don't think QtQuick is even supported... might require a huge effort to be actively maintained)
QmlWeb (Javascript apis to translate Qml files and interpret those on top of the HTML5 stack). Work in progress and only a subset of the whole QtQuick ecosystem might be supported in the long term. But still a really interesting project and maybe the most promising of all three. At least, it is the youngest one, and it might get some traction from the KDE community. http://akreuzkamp.de/2013/07/10/webapps-written-in-qml-not-far-from-reality-anymore/
You might also be interested in other scenegraphs technologies sitting on top of the web stack (amino, cake.js, rapahel.js...).
Last but not least, you might be interested by Wt (http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt).
No. You cannot compile QML, and in any form it cannot be deployed onto a Java Application server such as JBoss. Qml is strictly for creating applications to run on a local machine. It sounds like you want to build a Web Application out of HTML with some sort of backend like .Net.
I'm writing a pure Win32 application in MSVC 2012 using C++. After lots of struggling with trying to theme native win32 (I don't want to use .NET) I wouldn't mind seeing if I can do it much easier by having the application frontend rendered from HTML/CSS (which is easy to theme).
What lightweight libraries are there available for C++ that would let me have a web styled frontend on my desktop application, while seamlessly giving the user the impression that they aren't looking at a webpage?
Maybe something like http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/ could help you out.
I am planning to use yui or jquery ui as front end for native c++ applications. I found no bindings present for this purpose. Will it be feasible/possible to do this ? If it is so, then how shall i proceed? please suggest advice.thanks
#rwik - I can see your point and desire to do what you intend and I would presume it to be a wise move to be making at this point in time considering the vast facilities browsers bring to the table as well as other aspects... I know we are in September now and I have come across this pretty late, but this is also for others who have a similar problem...
As far as I know, descending from JavaScript in to C++ is pretty murky, mostly due to the heterogenous nature of Javascript engines [Rhino, Tracemonkey, Spidermonkey, V8, Caracan,Charka, etc] employed by different browsers. But there are indeed ways to do this - depending on how dirty you want to get your hands and, indeed, on your abilities...
If you were to go with Google as a browser, you should take a look at projects such as cproxyv8 - http://code.google.com/p/cproxyv8/ or v8-juice - http://code.google.com/p/v8-juice/ which both offer interesting facilities...
My preference however is with Mozilla - simply because of XML User-Interface Language (XUL) which, if you do not know, allows you to speedily create your own user interfaces by giving direct access to its layout engine. I.e., you can even do away with the browser look and have your own independent layout while still having all browser facilities at your disposal.
With respect to C++/Javascript interaction - projects should exist for all alternatives - it pays to check.
I wish you good luck if you haven't already solved this problem.
I'd recommend QT instead.
However since native C++ has nothing to do with GUI I'm going to assume you are making a library in C++. However Yui is basically just JavaScript as is jQuery. So if you're asking can a web page or script be a C++ application the answer is not really.
What you could do is create a web service which uses your C++ library and exposes an interface for your web based application to call it indirectly.
One way to accomplish this is to embed WebKit into your application and provide your custom C++ functionality via a plugin. Both the WebKit framework on OSX and the Chromium Embedded Framework on Windows allow this style of application development. This allows you to write a UI using local Javascript/HTML files without the need for a webserver.
There are no direct bindings in JQuery and YUI because these libraries run in a web browser. Thus unless you’re planning to write your own browser plugins, the integration with the C++ will happen at the webserver that serves the data to the browser.
You could feed the data from your C++ code directly into JQuery/YUI by building web services directly in C++. But you might want to build a web application that will be serving your JQuery/YUI pages and that act as user interface controller (like in the MVC pattern). Web application languages like Java, PHP, etc. all have ways to call native code. Java has JNDI and in PHP you build extensions that link to C++ code.
Is there any browser I could embedd in C++ application on Windows?
I need all features typical browser has (HTTP client, cookies support, DOM style HTML parser, JavaScript engine) except rendering.
Because I don't need rendering capability (and that's rather big part of a browser) I would prefer a browser with non monolithic design so I wouldn't have to include rendering stuff into my project.
It would be nice if it had C++ rather than C API.
I need this embedded browser mainly because I have much trouble finding C++ HTML parser which could handle broken HTML like browsers do.
If you know any, please answer Library Recommendation: C++ HTML Parser SO question or at least vote on it to increase a chance someone will give a good answer.
Sounds like all you need is something like libcurl which is an HTTP library and will let you do GET/POST/etc.
When I think browser I generally think rendering/JavaScript and not HTTP library.
Edit
In that case I'd look at WebKit (which I think has a C++ API) and hope you don't have to pull too much in.
Edit Again
On second thought (since rendering is such a big part of what browsers do), you might be better off using a stand-alone JS engine like SpiderMonkey and a stand-alone XML parser like Xerces-C (plus maybe tidy to make your HTML into XML).
I'm a bit confused by your question regarding embedding a web browser for which you don't need rendering capabilities. A web browser is rendering web pages by definition, unless you just need HTTP and XML with JavaScript capabilities which is a subset of a browser functionalities?
If you need a web browser to embed in your C++ application, I would suggest to consider Qt that comes with the WebKit plugin. It is C++, LGPL and has a very nice IDE (Qt Creator). I tried Qt with Qt Creator on unix (Ubuntu) and it was very impressive. The debugger is a bit light but it is just the first version. The adapter of Qt into visual c++ 2008 is now free.
You might also want to check out Awesomium-- it's free for non-commercial use and has all of the features you're looking for (if you don't need rendering, simply don't use it).
There is a project called CEF = The Chromium Embedded Framework - it is:
a simple framework for
embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications. It is a
BSD-licensed open source project founded by Marshall Greenblatt in
2008 and based on the Google Chromium project. Unlike the Chromium
project itself, which focuses mainly on Google Chrome application
development, CEF focuses on facilitating embedded browser use cases in
third-party applications.
and yes:
The base CEF framework includes support for the C and C++ programming
languages.
Including javascript support and html parsing makes this non-trivial task - you have to use one of the available browsers.
IE is usable through its COM model - you can create instance of it in your window be it invisible or not and call its javascript/html capabilities.
It has been designed to be used like that since the beginning and certainly it is working fine.
The other options are:
Gecko/Mozilla - a couple of years ago it wasn't usable like this, currently I think it is.
WebKit/V8 - no public API has been released for chrome yet, you could use webkit itself, but it doesn't have javascript engine. Another option is to take a look at the Chrome codebase and see if you could get out of it what you need.
I would probably go for IE, since it is maybe the easiest option and I have already used it. The other options seem to me more like building a browser instead of just using it.
How about Gecko ? You may not need the entire engine but you may find some its components useful like SpiderMonkey which is a JavaScript engine written in C.
I'd recommend picking up Qt for C++ programming. It has a built-in library that embeds Webkit with all the bells'n'whistles, and Qt is a great C++ library in general.
Old question, I know, but take a look on
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ky29ffxd%28v=vs.94%29.aspx
IActiveScript and family COM interfaces allows script execution (not only JS, any language that registers as script interpeter, for that matter) in-memory.
I havent used flash or action script much. I am planning a small project that i'd like to be online via flash but i'd like to reuse the code in my c/c++ projects
Is there a script language i can use? i am thinking lua or python. After googling i found flua which is incomplete and jython. Can i use java in flash? would it be a good idea to use python in java which is ran with flash?
Have you taken a look at Alchemy?
With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform. Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.
Have you looked at Haxe? http://www.haxe.org
The Haxe compiler can produce swf files, JavaScripts and other, with a language that resembles ActionScript or JavaScript more or less, depending on what language details you care about.
Here's this nice teaser from the haxe site: "Currently in testing, with the right build of Haxe from Hugh Sanderson, you can now output your Haxe applications to pure C++ source code, complete with makefiles."
But no, I don't know about using Java inside a Flash. You mean the Flash app executing Java while it's running? or using Java to create a Flash app?
There's no way to embed Java within a Flash movie. If you're creating a SWF that will display in a browser then you're restricted to Actionscript. You could create a Java applet, load it in the same page, and use javascript to communicate between the two, though I wouldn't recommend that.
If you're using a projector to create an EXE then you may be able to load and use C++ dlls, though I've never attempted this.