Connect c++ application with an http calls? - c++

is it possible to get the output of an c++ project as http request
eg:http://localhost:8080
just it need to output an xml or just any output...

Yes - this is typically some sort of CGI mechanism. Depending on the software you're using to run your webserver, if it supports CGI, it can be configured to invoke your program when certain URLs are requested. Your program's output to stdout would then be sent back to the HTTP client.
Be careful with this approach, especially if your application takes input from the user: bugs in your program can lead to security vulnerabilities if, for example, you have the possibility of a buffer overflow. Interpreted languages can sometimes offer some protection here.

You can use any executable as a CGI script (though they are usually perl or shell scripts).
Make your c++ executable print whatever you need to stdout (cout).
Here is a great into to CGI, and 4.2 tells you that you can make any executable run via CGI.

Related

system() executes shell command differently C++

I need to run this shell command in a C++ script:
"/usr/local/bin/mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so –w /usr/local/www" -b"
This command launches an application which broadcasts a video feed. When I execute this command via system() in C++ the application doesn't start properly.
I use:
system("/usr/local/bin/mjpg_streamer -i \"/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so\" -o \"/usr/local/lib/output_http.so –w /usr/local/www\" -b");
When I try to access the video stream after I started it with the C++ application the webpage returns:
501: Not Implemented!
no www-folder configured
I can't expect you guys to give me an application related solution, but I'm wondering if there's a difference in the way commands from a C++ application using system() and commands directly entered in a terminal are executed.
EDIT: The application broadcasts the video stream on IP:8080. I access it by going to that IP in my browser. Usually it opens a webpage with the stream in it but when I execute the command with the C++ application I get that error.
Edit: The old idea of mis-placed quotes was wrong; I realize that -w is actually an option to output_http.so, so the whole shebang must be passed as a single parameter to the -o option, as shown here or here etc.
In that case, check file permissions etc. Does /usr/local/www exist? Is it possible that you are running the shell command from a root shell?
Hey, I have a book recommendation, too, "one of the best tech books ever published": Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment. The guy knows -- sorry: knew -- what he was talking about.
I would avoid using the system(3) library function, or at the very least, check its returning error code. I don't understand why you are using " inside your command (I believe that in your particular case, you don't need them; but in general beware of code injection!). Read about globbing
You could use popen(3) to at least get the output of the command.
Even better, code yourself the running of the mjpg_streamer program using the fork(2) & execve(2) & waitpid(2) and other syscalls(2) (perhaps pipe(2), poll(2), dup2(2) etc...). Read Advanced Lnux Programming for more.

Catching system events in C Linux

I am writing an application on Linux which requires me to catch system events like:
System reboot
User 'xyz' logs in
'xyz' application crashes etc.
and need to execute some functionality based on that. For e.g.:
Run backup script
Run recovery program etc.
Can anyone please tell me how to catch system events in C/Linux ?
P.S: I am not talking about 'file system' events here :P
There is no concept of "system event". You need to specify which events you need to handle and implement appropriate mechanism for handling each:
System startup: The init process calls scripts from /etc/init.d during startup. The exact infrastructure differs slightly between distributions, but Linux Standards Base System Initialization should generally work on all.
User login/logout: The LSB also defines interface to the Pluggable Authentication Modules library. You can implement a shared library that will be called during login (and also other actions that require authentication and authorization). Depending on what you want to do there may already be a module that will work for you, so try looking for it first. In either case I don't think there is distribution-independent way of installing it and even on given distribution you have to consider that administrator might have made custom modification, so the installation will need manual intervention by the administrator.
Application crashes: You would have to instrument it.
I think you should consider reading systems logs - everything you ask about is logged to the syslog (for standard configuration). If your system uses syslog-ng, then you could even configure it to write directly to your program, see http://www.syslog.org/syslog-ng/v2/#id2536904 for details. But even with any other syslog daemon, you can always read file (or files) from /var/log just like tail -f does, end react on particular messages.
I'm not sure about catching application crashes - there's a kernel option to log every SIGSEGV in user processes, but AFAIK it is available only on ARM architecture - last resort would be to instrument your application (as Jan Hudec pointed out) to log something to syslog.

How to use c++ module with yaws

I don't have experience in using c++ with apache or other web server. But now want to use it with yaws to generate pdf from passed data. May be somebody has experience in doing so. Please any link. I havent found any. May be better to not use executable file but library and call its functions from yaws module.
Since you included the cgi tag on your question, one way to do this is to use the Yaws CGI capabilities. You'd simply run your C++ program as a CGI program. Yaws also supports FCGI, which lets you avoid starting a new instance of your C++ program for every request and instead have a dedicated TCP connection between Yaws and a daemon instance of your program.
Another way to do this is to write a Yaws appmod exporting an out/1 function. The argument to this will be an #arg record detailing all the information of the request being served. Your out/1 function could then call into an Erlang NIF written in C++, passing whatever information from the request it needs, and then taking replies and giving them back to Yaws as responses. PDF data could be returned from your NIF as Erlang binaries. With this approach, your C++ code runs in the same OS process as Yaws, so you have to be careful that your code never crashes else it will take the whole Erlang VM down with it, but aside from that this approach would be more efficient than FCGI or CGI.

c/c++ module for apache

I am invoking c/c++ from PHP using shell_exec(Server is httpd).
Is there any way where I can directly execute c/c++ executables from apache?
So the Apache will always execute only 1 executable each time (this file acts as a router). And then this executable will take care of the rest.
Thanks
You can execute it via Apache's CGI (or FastCGI) interface.
I'm not sure I get your question correctly, but if you just want to execute a lot of system commands from your script, then it doesn't really matter who calls them - you still end up having to spawn new processes and pay the price for that. If you don't want to run the commands asynchronously, e.g. if you always need one result to proceed to the next step, then just keep using shell_exec.
Unless I'm misunderstanding and you are actually compiling C++ code from within your PHP script. That'd be something else.

Error handling / error logging in C++ for library/app combo

I've encountered the following problem pattern frequently over the years:
I'm writing complex code for a package comprised of a standalone application and also a library version of the core that people can use from inside other apps.
Both our own app and presumably ones that users create with the core library are likely to be run both in batch mode (off-line, scripted, remote, and/or from command line), as well as interactively.
The library/app takes complex and large runtime input and there may be a variety of error-like outputs including severe error messages, input syntax warnings, status messages, and run statistics. Note that these are all incidental outputs, not the primary purpose of the application which would be displayed or saved elsewhere and using different methods.
Some of these (probably only the very severe ones) might require a dialog box if run interactively; but it needs to log without stalling for user input if run in batch mode; and if run as a library the client program obviously wants to intercept and/or examine the errors as they occur.
It all needs to be cross-platform: Linux, Windows, OSX. And we want the solution to not be weird on any platform. For example, output to stderr is fine for Linux, but won't work on Windows when linked to a GUI app.
Client programs of the library may create multiple instances of the main class, and it would be nice if the client app could distinguish a separate error stream with each instance.
Let's assume everybody agrees it's good enough for the library methods to log errors via a simple call (error code and/or severity, then printf-like arguments giving an error message). The contentious part is how this is recorded or retrieved by the client app.
I've done this many times over the years, and am never fully satisfied with the solution. Furthermore, it's the kind of subproblem that's actually not very important to users (they want to see the error log if something goes wrong, but they don't really care about our technique for implementing it), but the topic gets the programmers fired up and they invariably waste inordinate time on this detail and are never quite happy.
Anybody have any wisdom for how to integrate this functionality into a C++ API, or is there an accepted paradigm or a good open source solution (not GPL, please, I'd like a solution I can use in commercial closed apps as well as OSS projects)?
We use Apache's Log4cxx for logging which isn't perfect, but provides a lot of infrastructure and a consistent approach across projects. I believe it is cross-platform, though we only use it on Windows.
It provides for run time configuration via an ini file which allows you to control how the log file is output, and you could write your own appenders if you want specific behaviour (e.g. an error dialog under the UI).
If clients of your library also adopt it then it would integrate their logging output into the same log file(s).
Differentiation between instances of the main class could be supported using the nested diagnostic context (NDC) feature.
Log4Cxx should work for you. You need to implement a provider that allows the library user to catch the log output in callbacks. The library would export a function to install the callbacks. That function should, behind the scenes, reconfigure log4cxxx to get rid of all appenders and set up the "custom" appender.
Of course, the library user has an option to not install the callbacks and use log4cxx as is.