I would like to create a connection between two applications. Should I be using Client-Server or is there another way of efficiently communicating between one another? Is there any premade C++ networking client server libraries which are easy to use/reuse and implement?
Application #1 <---> (Client) <---> (Server) <---> Application #2
Thanks!
Client / server is a generic architecture pattern (much like factory, delegation, inheritance, bridge are design patterns). What you probably want is a library to eliminate the tedium of packing and unpacking your data in a format that can be sent over the wire. I strongly recommend you take a look at the protocol buffers library, which is used extensively at Google and released as open source. It will automatically encode / decode data, and it makes it possible for programs written in different languages to send and receive messages of the same type with all the dirty work done for you automatically. Protobuf only deals with encoding, not actually sending and receiving. For that, you can use primitive sockets (strongly recommend against that) or the Boost.Asio asynchronous I/O library.
I should add that you seem to be confused about the meaning of client and server, since in your diagram you have the application talking to a client which talks to a server which talks to another application. This is wrong. Your application is the client (or the server). Client / server is simply a role that your application takes on during the communication. An application is considered to be a client when it initiates a connection or a request, while an application is considered to be a server when it waits for and processes incoming requests. Client / server are simply terms to describe application behavior.
If you know the applications will be running on the same machine, you can use sockets, message queues, pipes, or shared memory. Which option you choose depends on a lot of factors.
There is a ton of example code for any of these strategies as well as libraries that will abstract away a lot of the details.
If they are running on different machines, you will want to communicate through sockets.
There's a tutorial here, with decent code samples.
Related
I have a certain application running on my computer. The same application can run on many computers on a LAN or different places in the world. I want to communicate between them. So I basically want a p2p system. But I will always know which computers(specific IP address) will be peers. I just want peers to have join and leave functionality. The single most important aim will be communication speed and time required. I assume simple UDP multicast (if anything like that exists) between peers will be fastest possible solution. I dont want to retransmit messages even if lost. Should I use an existing p2p library e.g. libjingle,etc. or just create some basic framework from scratch as my needs are pretty basic?
I think you're missing the point of UDP. It's not saving any time in a sense that a message gets faster to the destination, it's just you're posting the message and don't care if it arrives safely to the other side. On WAN - it will probably not arrive on the other side. UDP accross networks is problematic, as it can be thrown out by any router on the way which is tight on bandwidth - there's no guarantee of delivery for it.
I wouldn't suggest using UDP out of the topology under your control.
As to P2P vs directed sockets - the question is what it is that you need to move around. Do you need bi/multidirectional communication between all the peers, or you're talking to a single server from all the nodes?
You mentioned multicast - that would mean that you have some centralized source of data that transmits information and all the rest listen - in this case there's no benefit for P2P, and multicast, as a UDP protocol, may not work well accross multiple networks. But you can use TCP connections to each of the nodes, and "multicast" on your own, and not through IGMP. You can (and should) use threading and non-blocking sockets if you're concerned about sending blocking you, and of course you can use the QoS settings to "ask" routers to rush your sockets through.
You can use zeromq for support all network communication:
zeromq is a simple library encapsulate TCP and UDP for high level communication.
For P2P you can use the different mode of 0mq :
mode PGM/EPGM for discover member of P2P on your LAN (it use multicast)
mode REQ/REP for ask a question to one member
mode PULL/PUSH for duplicate one resource on the net
mode Publish/subscribe for transmission a file to all requester
Warning, zeromq is hard to install on windows...
And for HMI, use green-shoes ?
i think you should succeed using multicast,
unfortunately i do not know any library,
but still in case you have to do it from scratch
take a look at this:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Multicast-HOWTO.html
good luck :-)
I'm writing a tcp server for an online turn-based game. I've already written a prototype using php sockets, but would like to move to C++. I've been looking at the popular network libraries (ASIO, ACE, POCO, LibEvent), but currently unclear which one would best suit my needs:
1) Connections are persistent (on the order of minutes), and the server must be able to handle 100+ simultaneous connections.
2) Connections must be able to maintain state information (user login info). [my php prototype currently requires each client request to contain the login info]
3) Optionally and preferably multi-threaded, but a single process. Prefer not to have 1 thread per connection, but a fixed number of threads working on all open connections.
I'm leaning towards POCO's TCPServer or Reactor frameworks, but not exactly sure if they meet my requirements. I think the Reactor is single threaded, and the TCPServer enforces 1:1 threading/connection. Am I correct?
In either case case, I'm not exactly sure how to do the most important task of associating login info to a specific connection with connections coming and going at random.
Boost.Asio should meet your requirements. The reactor queue can be serviced by multiple threads. Using asynchronous methods will enable your design of a fixed number of threads servicing all connections.
The tutorials and examples are probably the best place to start if you are unfamiliar with the library.
You might also take a look at MUSCLE, a multi-user networking library and server I wrote with this sort of application in mind. It's BSD-licensed, handles hundreds of users, and includes a server-side database mechanism for storing and sharing any information you want the clients to know about each other. The server is single-threaded by default, but I haven't found that to be a problem in practice (and it's possible to extend the server to be multithreaded if that turns out to be necessary).
We have to communicate with a C++ component from a Java EE web application and my proposal involved using JMS server to communicate with the C++ component which is located on other machine.
However the developer of the C++ component wants me to open up TCP/IP sockets from the webapplication and communicate over XML. My view is that socket programming in web application is error prone and will not scale well since there is a limited amount of sockets that can be opened up.
Please let me have your architecture/design preference on using JMS vs TCP/IP sockets.
Thank you
Of course it's case by case. But give HTTP a serious chance. It is a good way to cross platform boundaries. It gives you ways to swap out the backend easily and there are many ways to scale it. I've used it from various platforms to hit centralized authentication service written in modern language. I've also done the opposite by putting frontend to a legacy code by turning it into a web server.
The best part about HTTP is that it's a standard protocol, so almost any platform is able to serve it and consume it out of the box. HTTP(S) or TCP takes care of many of the issues like reliability and security.
I am developing a client/server application for which I am evaluating a few options for the communications layer.
As part of this communication framework, I am contemplating using google's protocol buffer (PB) for representation of the transport data instead of re-inventing my own binary structure.
Now coming on to the actual transport, I am wondering if one should use plain sockets to send/receive these binary messages or use some form of middleware. Using a middleware has certain obvious advantages over sockets. A few that I care about include: communication models - publish/subscribe, request/response and fail over.
On the other hand, using sockets has the advantage of low overhead compared to the middleware approach and will deliver better performance.
One can also think of using the RPC libraries available with protocol buffers (third party add-ons on google's protocol buffer wiki) to communicate between the client and the server. Though it abstracts from the low level socket, it still does not support the middleware features.
At the moment, my client is an Adobe Flex GUI and two server side processes (One java and another C++). In the future, the client and server side can potentially have other services developed in other languages as well such as .NET
What do the experts feel about these choices and from experience what works well without compromising on performance. Are there other alternatives that developers go with?
Thanks
Dece
Unless it's a learning exercise, you absolutely, positively must use some middleware. There are lots of choices: AMQP, ZeroMQ, XMPP, Comet/Bayeux.
For your scenario, you probably want something web-based, so XMPP over HTTP may be a good option. However, I'm partial to Comet (though I have found Bayeux to be too complex for my needs).
Which platform?
If Windows then I have a free, simple, high performance, IO completion based pluggable server platform called WASP which is available from here.
Simply write a DLL or two and plug them in and you're done with the networking.
I don't currently have a protocol buffers based plugin example but it's on my list of things to do...
My company is planning on implementing a remote programming tool to configure embedded devices in the field. I assumed that these devices would have an HTTP client on them, and planned to implement some REST services for them to access. Unfortunately, I found out that they have a TCP stack but no HTTP client. One of my co-workers suggested that we try to send “soap packets” over port 80 without an HTTP client. The devices also don’t have any SOAP client. Is this possible? Would there be implications if there was a web server running on the network the devices are connected to? I’d appreciate any advice or best practices on how to implement something like this.
If your servers are serving simple files, the embedded devices really only need to send an HTTP GET request (possibly with a little extra data identifying the device, so the server can know which firmware version to send).
From there, it's pretty much a simple matter of reading the raw data coming in on the embedded device's socket -- you might need to only disregard the HTTP header on the response, or you could possibly configure your server to not send it for those requests.
you don't really need an HTTP client per-se. HTTP is a very simple text-based protocol that you can implement yourself if you need to.
That said, you probably won't need to implement it yourself. If they have a TCP stack and a standard sockets library, you can probably find a simple C library (such as this one) that wraps up HTTP or SOAP functionality for you. You could then just build that library into your application.
Basic HTTP is not a particularly difficult protocol to implement by hand. It's a text and line based protocol, save for the payload, and the servers work quite well with "primitive, ham fisted" clients, which is all a simple client needs to be.
If you can use just a subset, likely, then simply write it and be done.
You can implement a trivial http client over sockets (here is an example of how to do it in ruby: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/ruby_socket_programming.htm )
It probably depends what technology you have available on your embedded devices - if you can easily consume JSON or XML then a webservice approach using the above may work for you.