We are looking for a better C++ HTTP client library, and we're willing to pay for it.
The product we want needs to be a statically linked, and to work on these platforms:
Windows XP, Vista, 7
OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6
We want it to do the following tasks really well:
1. Make HTTP GET and POST requests
2. Handle meta refresh and http redirection responses automatically
3. Automatically use proxy settings from 'Internet Options', 'ProxyCfg', or 'preferences.plist', if present
4. Optionally utilize user-supplied proxy settings
5. Efficiently provide http and proxy authentication handling if required
6. Implement proxy auto-config and WPAD
There are a few free libraries that provide some of these requirements: boost.asio, curl, winhttp, Qt/wxWidgets, udrl, ultimate tcp/ip, but we haven't found any that satisfy all our requirements. We currently use libcurl to do much of this stuff in our current product, but we're not network programmers, and we'd like to replace our code with a better solution written by experts.
Is there a commercial product that would fill our needs?
Also, it would be really nice if there were a product that provided filter-recognition capability for HTTP responses. This would be really cool, and it would save us from having to write up a bunch of parsing code for filter detection. We already detect a few popular filters such as Websense, DeepNines, LightSpeed, Network Composer, Dans Guardian, SonicWALL, Privoxy, Bsecure, and SmartFilter. But it would be great if someone else did it for us, more completely and more up-to-date.
Has anyone heard of such a product?
Have you looked at NEON? It has pretty much everything you need.
I know it's not C++ specific, but it's C so you could integrate it very easily in your C++ project.
These guys have been around forever and are very well known to provide good networking SDK's: /n software
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 do computational research with a C++/CUDA library that does intensive number crunching. Recently I was thinking to set up a little showcase of my library on my webpage where people could work interactively with the library and see the results (plots, animations, etc.) in real time.
I have very limited html and website creating expertise. Are there libraries out there to link the html front-end to the C++/CUDA back-end? I'm developing in Linux environment but obviously I'd like my webpage to be accessed by anyone independent of their OS and/or browser.
So after a little bit of research I found the Wt library which is written in C++ and used for webpage development. Based on the information on their homepage, it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for:
Typical use scenarios:
High performance, complex web applications which are fully personalized (and thus cannot benefit from caching), fully Ajax enabled and at the same time entirely accessible and Search Engine Optimized.
Web-based GUIs for embedded systems benefit from the low footprint of a C++ web application server.
Web-based GUIs that require integration with (existing) C++ libraries, for example for scientific or engineering applications, or existing C++ desktop applications
I did something like this. To do this, I used a simple library I wrote called jrb_node at https://github.com/kennethho/jrb_node
There are other libraries like cppnetlib http://cpp-netlib.org/
Basically you make a small http server that based on the request will perform some computation and return the results as an http response. You can then combine that with javascript and Ajax if you want to make it more interactive.
An alternative to consider is to use WebCL. CUDA is pretty similar to OpenCL and it should be pretty easy to convert your code to the latter. If you have other C++ code, that might be a bit of problem though.
Do you want to run CUDA on server (e.g. the users will input the parameters, push a button and your server will do number crunching) or on client (e.g. it will be user GPU that does computations)?
For server-side you should be able to use pretty much any server technology - PHP, JSP, etc. They all provide a way to integrate to "native code".
For client-side you will not be able to do with just HTML - you need to use some "fat client" technology - e.g. ActiveX, Java applet. I do not know if Silverlight or Flash have access to native code. IMHO, you might as well just write a Qt application and put a download link on your site.
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.
I am about to start some work on Axis/C. I have a fair idea of C and webservices separately. I am also fairly ok with *nix.
Can someone tell me about the complexity related to creating a webservice with support for MIME/DIME and MTOM with Axis/C? The webservice will be invoked from Java as well as C++ clients.
Does Axis/C have any known limitations in this regard? What are the best starting points for learning Axis/C in general and MTOM et al. support in particular.
I would advise against Apache Axis/C or Axis2c for that matter. Both these projects lack active development and member contribution. Last Axis2c release was in 2009 and Axis/c release page link doesn't even work.
I have developed a reasonably complex web-services implementation (both client and server), and I have ran into these issues:
Documentation is just OK. Nothing great.
Returning status codes of your choice is not easy.
Some HTTP verbs have bugs - for example I couldn't get DELETE to work.
I have faced issues with the supplied XML library guththila. libxml worked better for me.
It's hard to build complex REST routes for your application.
Handling incoming XML objects is quite cumbersome and inconvenient. I ended up writing a library of convenience functions.
JSON support is missing.
Your application will tend to become large with each server-side service implementation running into at lease a hundred lines of code.
WSO2 seems to be another option as far as web-services in C is concerned. The Axis2C team is mostly full of WSO2 people anyways. I haven't tried it though, but definitely looks more promising than Axis2C.
I had to modify the code to get it axis 1 to compile on fedora 13 + I believe I had to add a pure virtual some where in the code
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.