Webserver(Apache2/ngnix) + PHP(fastcgi) + MySQL
The above combination is common.
How about using C++ instead of PHP? As there is a C++ driver for MySQL, so database connection won't be a big problem. But how to implement the fastcgi in C++? Is looking at php-fpm a good starting point?
Anyone with similar experience please share.
Thanks.
Perhaps it might be easier to write a C++ extension for PHP that has all your code in it. That way, you can use the PHP fastcgi engine but your entire webapp bypasses PHP (the language and the compiler) entirely.
"Ablaze is a FastCGI web application development framework for C++ designed for efficiency, high throughput and lightning response time."
Hi this http://cplusplus-soup.com/2009/12/28/c-instead-of-php-for-the-web/ can be usefull
Related
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 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.
How can i outsource performance critical stuff to C++.
Is there any example ?
If you're talking about Flex on AIR platform (basically out of browser application), there's a way to interact with native code on the same machine.
You may want to check this out (official doc from Adobe) : http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/ajax/quickstart/interacting_with_native_process_print.html
If you're talking about flex in the browser, then I would agree with Dmitry, you can use many different things:
- Web Services
- HTTP Request/Response
- RPC calls
- Or even make your own real-time socket (in some cases can be the most performant way to do this)
Now, that would require a C++ Server, listening to those calls, doing the stuff and then replying. => Meaning you need networking.
Now this is somewhat confusing based on tags that you chose. flex and bison are used to create compilers, and related tools.
If you are using Adobe flex then you would generally get your data from a webservice. There are toolkits that can help you create these webservices with C++ like gSOAP http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/soap.html.
I'm looking at doing some work (for fun) in a compiled language to run some simple tests and benchmarks against php.
Basically I'd like to see what other people use for C++ CGI programming. (Including backend database, like mysql++ or something else)
I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but there is a C++ web framework called wt (pronounced "witty"). It's been kept pretty much up to date and if you want robust C++ server-side code, this is probably what you're looking for.
You can check it out and read more at the wt homepage.
P.S. You may have some trouble installing wt if you don't have experience with *nix or C++ libraries. There are walkthroughs but since frameworks like these are the road less traveled, expect to hit a few bumps.
Another option is the Cgicc library which appears to be mature (currently at version 3.x):
http://www.gnu.org/software/cgicc/
If I were thinking of working at that level, I'd probably just write a straight-up Apache or IIS module instead of a CGI.
That said, if you do want to go with CGI, I'd suggest using the venerable cgic from Thomas Boutell. It's a "plain" C library, but it's been in constant use since the mid '90s so it's thoroughly tested and solid as a rock.
Check out Boost's C++ CGI class, which is not a part of boost yet.
In short, I don't think there is such a thing for generic server CGI programming (happy to be proven wrong of course).
Instead you'll probably have to target the server APIs, such as Apache's. This looks like a reasonable introduction to request processing, which will be a big part of what you're doing.
As an alternative, Lighttpd may be even more developer-friendly, and (particularly if you're looking at performance) faster.
I note there's a cpp-netlib under development but it seems to be HTTP client only.
I've found very pleasant to use CppCMS to develop a Fast CGI app to deploy in a nginx server - although it never went in production =( . The CppCMS project also includes some libraries for SQL connectivity.
We are looking for a C++ Soap web services framework that support RPC, preferably open source.
Any recommendations?
WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ (WSO2 WSF/C++), a binding of WSO2 WSF/C into C++ is a C++ extension for consuming Web Services in C++.
http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/cpp
Apache Axis is an open source, XML based Web service framework. It consists of a Java and a C++ implementation of the SOAP server, and various utilities and APIs for generating and deploying Web service applications.
http://ws.apache.org/axis/
http://code.google.com/p/staff/
Staff is Web Service Framework for C++ (service/component and client-side)/JavaScript(client-side) based on Apache Axis2/C.
Open-source, released with Apache License V2.0.
Try the ffead-cpp framework, it provides in-built web-service support, rest, json and many other useful features.
We are using EasySoap (http://easysoap.sourceforge.net/)
While not FOSS another library is ATL Server library from Microsoft.
It is C++ template based with some proprietary attributes by Microsoft. i.e. not standard C++
You can check out xmlbeansxx. This is a kind of lightweight, low level solution, compared to complete frameworks. This has advantages in some cases.
Invoking SOAP WebServices using xmlbeansxx Article
Code example is here:
WsClient.cpp.
You could try gSOAP. Available under GPL and commercial licences.
I have used SWIG to make an interface from C++ to Java or Python and then used the typical web interface support for those languages.
Since Java and Python have reflection the web services frameworks that exist for them have a much easier time passing data around.
Threading wise if your C++ code is thread safe you can let the Java server manage the creation of threads for concurrent requests etc. and just call into your C++ code using JNI.
As a bonus you can test your C++ code from Python using these same SWIG interfaces.
I think the way to go is to write your service in C++ (I am assuming you did all the homework and there is a good reason you want to write in C++) and then front it using an RPC server. Use something like Thrift or Protobufs for a fast RPC implementation.
Now write your web frontend in the language of your choice - python would be mine - and make RPC calls to do all your heavy lifting.
POCO Remoting gives you a very simple way of creating web services in C++ by just annotating C++ class definitions with special comments and running a code generator over it. It's commercial, but delivered with full source code. A free eval version is available. Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc.
I concur with imjorge's answer and add that there's a C/C++ version of the Axis2 framework (a more flexible, extensible Axis) that does SOAP via RPC and all sorts of stuff including a bunch of the WS-* specs.
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/c/
Apache axis-c:
Simple to use, but seems abandoned.. not even download pages is working for several months
WSOF WSFCPP:
Fast quickstart dev, both binded or no-binded implementation, based on Apache AxisC and it seems most of the current developers of Apache Axis is from WSOF company. Besides the Great potential I've detected a memory leak.
I'm currently using Gsoap and It has very good performance.
Gsoap "mixed notation" between old c style and some (bad?) practices for C++ bothers me some.. but this is only code-furniture.
POCO:
Is a full-feature, modern (java?) like library. It is open source software, licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0. You'll have to write some things from scrach, but with great support, utility classes and etc great library.. Innovations from c++11+ with all boost initiatives + POCO + a new Build/Dependency system more "gradle like" will certainly bring c++ to new areas of development.