I am having a desktop application which having a UI interface made in Qt linked with a library which is doing all the calculation stuff. Values from UI is taken and pass to the API's in the DLL to get the output which is shown on Screen.
Now i want to do the same thing by transferring my application UI to a web page so that people can access the tool from anywhere without any installation process.
I want to retain my c++ DLL code so i don't have to do a lot of work. I am thinking of just converting this DLL to a C++ server by any communication Process(Sockets). I want to host this application on my company's website. (We have to make the website also so we are open to any set of tools).
I want to know what will be the best set of tools to do this stuff. Also there will be lot of data exchange between the webpage and server so the wholething should be optimized also. I goggled a bit and find stuff like silverlight and ASP.NET, But i am still not very clear which option will be more suitable.
I am a c++ programmer with no web application development experience. I am open to learn any new technology.
Thanks
Why not use Qt on the web directly? There are several projects like this one: http://qtwui.sourceforge.net/
There is a netscape plugin that will host a QT application and an ActiveX control wrapper on the QT website. You could use one of those to wrap your application. Note that this approach would require the user (or their administrator) to download and install the plugin.
An alternative approach might be to run your application through a remote desktop such as XVNC, NX or an RDP based layer. IIRC browser based remote desktop clients are available for most such protocols.
A few options:
pick a messaging/queue implementation (like http://www.zeromq.org/) and provide a service
implement a Windows Web Service if you want to be more enterprise friendly: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335693.aspx
I would not expose the implementation on the internet. Enough to have a simple buffer overflow and the machine can be taken over quickly. Adding a layer between the app and the web provides an easy way to validate input, access, stats ...
You should be able to use your DLL from an wt or cppcms application. Then you do not have to learn something new and can just use C++.
The way I'm currently doing this is with Boost.Python + django
Related
I have a Windows Embedded Compact 7.0 based development board which has a HTTPD webserver and SQL Compact DB,
Objective: My task is to deploy few HTML5 pages and create C++ component for DB access.
Current solution : Currently we are thinking of CGI interface between HTML5 and C++
component, not sure if this is possible , but our vendor (where this board bought from) confirmed that WinCE can support ISAPI (much faster CGI).
I would like to know if we are in a right direction? or Is there a alternate solution to this?
Asking this question because I came across this article in Code project about http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/336018/Building-C-Applications-with-HTML[Building C++ Application with HTML5] which talks about usage of Webkit and Qt.
Please let me know if I can explore as per this article. Can this work under Embedded-based environment.
Thanks in advance for your replies.
It's one path. This article uses QT to intercept requests, so you are basically implementing your own web server
I don't know about your requirements but you may have quite some work if you wanna do it by yourself (implementing Sessions, Authentication, Http methods, SSL, etc).
In my case, I deactivated the standard HTTPD server and used Padarn for a C# backend and I found it to be ok, but it's not free.
I didn't spend much time looking for C/C++ servers but I believe setting up a pre-made web-server is a good path path unless that article meets your requirements.
I am looking for the best way to add support for a REST based Web Service to an MFC C++ Application. This is legacy code that has been around a long time.
I need to have the Application provide the Web Service. I've researched this, and the articles are about consuming Web Services in a C++ App. I envision having to monitor a port and respond to the HTTP requests. It would probably make more sense to tie in with WCF and IIS, but I am not sure how to move forward.
I already have a tool of "making" this App into a Windows Service. I realize it would be better to have a "real" app, and this is what I have to work with. There is so much logic in this code and we are limited in development time, so we are taking the fastest approach possible. We also cannot use DCOM, as the Web Service will be called by a Linux based system.
Any suggested articles would be much appreciated.
For C++ you can test two libraries WSF/C and gSoap, another alternative is to develop it with C# and WCF , and communicate between C# and C++ using C++\CLI.
I use the Poco Net c++ library for this as it supports both HTTP client and server functionality. I considered various other libraries including Boost based stuff, but other than Poco I struggled to find everything I needed in one tidy package. It also has some easy to use mutex support which became essential for me as soon as I added a web server front-end to what had previously been a simple single threaded console app. Poco is cross platform but I mainly use it windows and it has served me well to date. I'm not very clued up on MFC so I don't know how it would get on in that department though.
Dear everyone, I am just curious, is it possible to create standalone GUI application which further can be easily migrated to the web? Or, even better, will be able to work in two modes locally and remotely through web browser. Since the main application logic is already written on C++ I read a little about Qt Quick. As I understood it is somehow possible to mix web application and standalone one, but I haven't found direct example illustrating the case I am interested in. Any ideas?
Depends on what your application does. If it is heavy UI bound and not calculation intense you will not get very far with Qt. There are a few toolkits for Java like GWT which help you to program an AJAX app like you would program a normal desktop GUI - but i don't know any C++ framework doing the same.
For a non heavy UI bound application i would convert the UI to HTML5 and just deploy the webserver infrastructure with your application and a self written Browser based on QT. With this it is trivial to switch between local and remote apps.
For a heavy UI bound application, use GWT.
If you write your back in terms of services, then your stand-alone and web front ends can both use them. That lets you have multiple user interfaces without affecting the processing. Easy to add mobile, too.
for one of my applications I'd like to provide a minimal web interface. This core application is written in C++ and uses Qt4 as a framework. Since I'm also using some libraries I wrote to calculate some things and do some complex data management, I'd like to use this existing code as a backend to the web interface.
Idea 1: Using an embedded web server
The first thing I tried (and which worked to some degree) was using an embedded web server (mongoose). As you can imagine, it is just a very thin library and you have to implement a lot of things yourself (like session management, cookies, etc.).
Idea 2: Using a normal web server and adding a fcgi/cgi/scgi backend to my application
The next thing that came to my head was using a mature but compact web server (for instance, lighttpd) and simple provide a fcgi/scgi/cgi backend to it. I could write the web application using a good framework, like Pylons, PHP, or RoR, (...) and simply have an URL prefix, like /a/... which allows me to directly talk to the backend.
I tried to implement the libfcgi into my application, but it looks messier than needed (for instance you'd have to implement your own TCP/IP sockets to pass on data between your app and the web server and tunnel it through the FCGI library, meh)
Idea 3: Creating a command line version of my application which does the most basic things and use a normal web server and framework to do the rest
This is the third idea that came to my head. It is basically about creating a web application using a traditional way (PHP, RoR, etc.) and using a command line version of my application to process data and return it when needed.
I've got some experience with creating web applications, but I never had to do something like this, so I'd like to hear some ideas or suggestions. I'd like to use JavaScript on the browsers (AJAX, that is) and pass some JSON constructs between web browser and server to make the user experience a bit smoother.
So what are your suggestions, ideas on this? I don't want to re-invent the wheel, honestly.
I would never expose a custom written application to the net as front-end, for that servers like apache or lighthttp are build. They give you some serious security out of the box.
As for interaction of your app with that webserver, it depends a bit on the load and what kind of experience you have with writing software in PHP, python or other languages supported by your web server (via interpreter of course).
A slight load, and a command line tool accessed from PHP might do perfectly well.
A more heavy load and you might wish to implement a simple (SOAP?) server with Qt and access that from a python (or php) script.
That way you don't need to do layout in you app, and you also don't need to implement security all that much.
I'm currently researching a similar situation (custom web app backend using Qt), and the least bad option is FastCGI. Found something you might be interested in. Not production ready without some serious testing, but this might be a good starting point for Qt - FastCGI interop: FastCGIQt
I've used the FastCGI Protocol Driver library for a similar project (also a Qt application), the download link is at the end of that page [Libfastcgi]. Integration with the application turned out actually comparatively easy. Lighttpd + mod_fastcgi was used as web server. Can't say anything about FastCGIQt, though.
You Wt works well to provide a web interface to Qt based applications. Both have a similar programming style, and there's an example that demonstrates the integration with Qt.
Here is example of embedded QML-server: https://github.com/ncp1402/ql-server
Our company has a set of 3d modeling softwares written in c++ with qt based gui. We are planning to offer these applications to customers to try them from a web browser. I mean to say, we need to create web interfaces for native c++ codes. Please suggest me which technology, languages should be used. If possible please give some links to some white papers or case studies for this kind of projects. I am totally clue less :)
Ideally you would keep your c++ code on the server and use a mixture of HTML and Javascript on the browser. However since 3d modeling is so client centric you may have to run some c++ code directly in the browser.
There are a few options to look at:
Emscripten
Adobe Alchemy
Google Native Client
A Java Applet using NestedVM
Netscape plugin API
ActiveX
You could also run a few instances of your application on your server inside an XVnc session and let people use it through a VNC viewer applet. The simplest solution however is still to offer a downloadable demo of your application.
Have a look at Wt
Take a look at Native Client.
Soon you might be use WebGL to do 3D in the browser. But how long it will take for browsers to include it I do not know. But it might be good to look at it to not rule out using it in the future.
If creating everything again is too expensive, always you can create a distributed application:
One program running the main application in C++ and generating (for example) XML files.
A web application reading the XML files generated by the C++ application and translating them into the web application language (for example Adobe Flex).
Good luck!