A question prompted by jbar's question.
In scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl, there are libraries that simplify generating dynamic HTML. (For example, the cgi module in Ruby.)
Are there any similar packages for C++? I don't know of one, and at least some desultory googling didn't reveal one.
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt#/
I don't know anything about it, but their web-page is clean and the introduction sounds like exactly what you're looking for...
Wt (pronounced 'witty') is a C++ library and application server for developing and deploying web applications. It is not a 'framework', which enforces a way of programming, but a library.
...
In contrast, a web application developed with Wt is written in only one compiled language (C++), from which the library generates the necessary HTML/XHTML, Javascript, CGI, SVG/VML/Canvas and AJAX code.
Cgicc does HTML generation. I've toyed with it once, and it seemed pretty nice.
Related
I have a few years experience programming c++ and a little less then that using Qt. I built a data mining software using Qt and I want to make it available online. Unfortunately, I know close to nothing about web programming. Firstly, how easy or hard is this to do and what is the best way to go about it?
Supposing I am looking to hire someone to make me a secure, long-term, extensible, website for an online software service, what skill set should I be looking for?
Edit:
I want to make my question a little more specific:
How can I take a bunch of working c++ functions and port the code so I can run it server side on a website?
Once this is done, would it be easy to make changes to the c++ code and have the algorithm automatically update on the site?
What technologies would be involved? Are there any cloud computing platforms that would be good for something like this?
#Niklaos-what does it mean to build a library and how does one do that?
You might want to have a look at Wt[1]. Its a C++ web framework which is programmed more or less like a desktop GUI application. One of the use cases quoted is to bring legacy apps into the web.
[1] http://www.webtoolkit.eu
Port the functions to Java, easily done from C++, you can even find some tools to help - don't trust them implicitly but they could provide a boost.
See longer answer below.
Wrap them in a web application, and deploy them on Google App-Engine.
Java version of a library would be a jar file.
If you really want to be able to update the algorithm implementation dynamically, then you could implement them in Groovy, and upload changes through a form on your webapp, either as files or as a big text block, need to consider version control.
The effort/skillset involved to perform the task depends on how your wrote your code. If it is in a self-contained library, and has a clean (re-entrant, thread safe) API, you could probably hire a web developer (html/php/asp etc) to write the UI interface to the library for a relatively small cost. The skills required would be dependant on the technologies you wanted to use. For Windows development I would suggest C#/ASP. The applicant would require knowledge of interfacing with native libraries from a managed language. This is assuming that you dont mind the costs of Windows deployment for your application.
On the otherhand, if the library is complex or needs to be re-written to support the extensibility you are looking for, asking here will not get you much.
BTW: here is a great article on Marshalling if you chose to implement using C#/ASP
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164193.aspx
First, DO NOT USE PHP :D
I used it for some projects (the last one with symphony framework) and i almost shoot my self !
If you are very familiar with C++, ASP .NET could be a good solution because if you like C++ you are going to love C#.
Any ways, I personally use Ruby on Rails for 6 months now and I LOVE IT. I won't write you a book here but the framework is pure gold !
The only problem is that Ruby is a very special language. You will probably be a bit lost a the beginning. But as every one you will learn to love it.
But that was only for the server side. Indeed, there 3 technologies you won't be able to avoid if you want to start to develop web applications.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript are presents every where. This is why i'm thinking you should start by HTML and CSS then JavaScript (with jQuery).
When you've got some basics with these 3 technologies you should be able to choose the server side language.
But you've got to tell you one thing, it's not going to be easy !
PS : Ruby on Rails uses HAML and SASS. These 2 languages replaces HTML and CSS you should have a look at them quickly because they are awesome.
I am familiar with both Python and C++ as a programmer. I was thinking of writing my own simple web application and I wanted to know which language would be more appropriate for server-side web development.
Some things I'm looking for:
It has to be intuitive. I recognize that Wt exists and it follows the model of Qt. The one thing I hate about Qt is that they encourage strange syntax through obfuscated means (e.g. the "public slots:" idiom). If I'm going to write C++, I need it to be standard, recognizable, clean code. No fancy shmancy silliness that Qt provides.
The less non-C++ or Python code I have to write, the better. The thing about Django (Python web framework) is that it requires you pretty much write the HTML by hand. I think it would be great if HTML forms took more of a wxWidgets approach. Wt is close to this but follows the Qt model instead of wxWidgets.
I'm typically writing video games with C++ and I have no experience in web development. I want to write a nice web site for many reasons. I want it to be a learning experience, I want it to be fun, and I want to easily be able to concentrate on "fun stuff" (e.g. less boilerplate, more meat of the app).
Any tips for a newbie web developer? I'm guessing web app frameworks are the way to go, but it's just a matter of picking one.
I would go with Wt because:
You already know C++
It has a nice layout system, so you don't need to know lots of HTML
It is very well written and a pleasure to code in
Your deployed apps will handle 50 times the load of the python app on less hardware (from experience with pylons apps, 10,000 times the load of a plone app :P)
It has all the libraries that the guy in the first question says it doesn't and more
In built development webserver
Templating language
ORM
unit testing help
open-id and user+password authentication
A brilliant widget library
Web 2.0 isn't an after thought; it wasn't designed on a Request+Response model like all the python frameworks (as far as I know), but on an event driven interactive model.
It uses WebSockets if available
Falls back to normal ajax gracefully if not
Falls back to http for browsers like linx
It is more like coding a gui app than a web app, which is probably what you're used to
It is statically typed and therefore less error prone. Does def delete(id): take an int or a string ?
The unit tests (on my apps at least) take 10-100 times less time than my python app unit tests to run (including the compile time)
It has a strong and friendly community. All my email list posts are answered in 0-3 days.
If you'd like to avoid writing HTML, you could try GWT. However, in my experience, using an intermediate framework to generate HTML and ECMAScript never works anywhere near as well as hand-writing the pages.
[edit] nikow mentions in the comments that Pyjamas is a port of GWT to Python.
Regarding the language, if given the choice between C++ and Python I would pick Python 100% of the time. Even ignoring the obvious difference in abstraction between those languages, Python simply has more useful libraries than C++. You don't have to write your own development-oriented web server -- Django comes with one. You don't need to write a custom template library -- Python has Genshi. Django comes with a capable ORM layer, or for even more control you can use SQLAlchemy. It's barely a contest.
Django is good point to start web development it is great framework
If you look for C++ take a look on CppCMS, it is much more close to Django, it is not like Wt that mimics Qt.
In any case, it is really depends on your needs. C++ can be used for embedded or high performance web applications, but for medium range web sites Django would be better. (and I'm developer of CppCMS)
I think you better go firt python in your case, meanwhile you can extend cppCMS functionalities and write your own framework arround it.
wt was a good idea design, but somehow not that suitable.
If you are exploring Python frameworks (based on the excepted answer I think you are) I think you really owe it to yourself to check out CherryPy. When you write CherryPy apps, you really are just writing Python apps. The framework gets out of your way in a real hurry. Your free to choose your own templating, ORM (if you choose to use ORM), etc. Seriously, take 10 or 20 minutes and give it a look.
The only reason you might want to use C++ over Python is when speed is paramount.
If this is going to be your first web-app, you'll probably be ok with just Python, and your development speed will be orders of magnitude better than with CPP.
Django's templating language is far from powerless, to me it actually seems very pythonic. You actually can write pure python in a template(although this is generally not recommended).
Even better, it's possible to replace Django's templating system with the one you like.
My personal favourite language for this is HAML.
Here's some data on this:
Is there a HAML implementation for use with Python and Django
Having looked several ones, like django, pylos, web2py, wt. My recommendation is web2py. It's a python version of "ruby on rails" and easy to learn.
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.
Is there any browser I could embedd in C++ application on Windows?
I need all features typical browser has (HTTP client, cookies support, DOM style HTML parser, JavaScript engine) except rendering.
Because I don't need rendering capability (and that's rather big part of a browser) I would prefer a browser with non monolithic design so I wouldn't have to include rendering stuff into my project.
It would be nice if it had C++ rather than C API.
I need this embedded browser mainly because I have much trouble finding C++ HTML parser which could handle broken HTML like browsers do.
If you know any, please answer Library Recommendation: C++ HTML Parser SO question or at least vote on it to increase a chance someone will give a good answer.
Sounds like all you need is something like libcurl which is an HTTP library and will let you do GET/POST/etc.
When I think browser I generally think rendering/JavaScript and not HTTP library.
Edit
In that case I'd look at WebKit (which I think has a C++ API) and hope you don't have to pull too much in.
Edit Again
On second thought (since rendering is such a big part of what browsers do), you might be better off using a stand-alone JS engine like SpiderMonkey and a stand-alone XML parser like Xerces-C (plus maybe tidy to make your HTML into XML).
I'm a bit confused by your question regarding embedding a web browser for which you don't need rendering capabilities. A web browser is rendering web pages by definition, unless you just need HTTP and XML with JavaScript capabilities which is a subset of a browser functionalities?
If you need a web browser to embed in your C++ application, I would suggest to consider Qt that comes with the WebKit plugin. It is C++, LGPL and has a very nice IDE (Qt Creator). I tried Qt with Qt Creator on unix (Ubuntu) and it was very impressive. The debugger is a bit light but it is just the first version. The adapter of Qt into visual c++ 2008 is now free.
You might also want to check out Awesomium-- it's free for non-commercial use and has all of the features you're looking for (if you don't need rendering, simply don't use it).
There is a project called CEF = The Chromium Embedded Framework - it is:
a simple framework for
embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications. It is a
BSD-licensed open source project founded by Marshall Greenblatt in
2008 and based on the Google Chromium project. Unlike the Chromium
project itself, which focuses mainly on Google Chrome application
development, CEF focuses on facilitating embedded browser use cases in
third-party applications.
and yes:
The base CEF framework includes support for the C and C++ programming
languages.
Including javascript support and html parsing makes this non-trivial task - you have to use one of the available browsers.
IE is usable through its COM model - you can create instance of it in your window be it invisible or not and call its javascript/html capabilities.
It has been designed to be used like that since the beginning and certainly it is working fine.
The other options are:
Gecko/Mozilla - a couple of years ago it wasn't usable like this, currently I think it is.
WebKit/V8 - no public API has been released for chrome yet, you could use webkit itself, but it doesn't have javascript engine. Another option is to take a look at the Chrome codebase and see if you could get out of it what you need.
I would probably go for IE, since it is maybe the easiest option and I have already used it. The other options seem to me more like building a browser instead of just using it.
How about Gecko ? You may not need the entire engine but you may find some its components useful like SpiderMonkey which is a JavaScript engine written in C.
I'd recommend picking up Qt for C++ programming. It has a built-in library that embeds Webkit with all the bells'n'whistles, and Qt is a great C++ library in general.
Old question, I know, but take a look on
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ky29ffxd%28v=vs.94%29.aspx
IActiveScript and family COM interfaces allows script execution (not only JS, any language that registers as script interpeter, for that matter) in-memory.
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.