A colleague and I have spent a few years developing a really cool Matlab application, MDLcompress. Within Matlab, I can type "MDLcompress('filename.txt')" and it will tell me all sorts of really cool stuff about the contents of filename.txt. We'd like to allow other people to use MDLcompress without downloading the code, installing Matlab, etc. Ideally, we'd have a simple web page where they selected a file from their machine, it got uploaded to my workstation (which is already running tomcat for other purposes, if that makes things easier), kicked off a process along the lines of "matlab < MDLcompress.m filename.txt > results.txt" and then displayed results.txt in their browser or showed a link to let them download it.
Trouble is, my Matlab skills far exceed my web skills. Google has 100 generic tutorials, but nothing as simple as I want, at least not specific to Matlab.
Thanks in advance
If you are mostly proficient in MATLAB you can write web application in MATLAB with MATLAB Web Server
Edit:
Matlab Web Server is discontinued, so it is not for you if you use recent version of Matlab. May be this tutorial will help to create CGI module from Matlab code.
A possible way is to compile the matlab code into C,
and then make the C file into an apache module, and use an apache server.
I have no idea how complicated this is, but it may work.
Based on the tags, I assume you're trying to deploy to Tomcat or similar. The most straightforward way to do this is to use MATLAB Builder JA to create a Java wrapper for your code, then use the standard tools to deploy the Java as a web service.
If you can afford to lose some of Matlab's more powerful proprietary features, there are several open-source numerical computation engines that use syntax mostly compatible with that of Matlab. One of the most mature of these is GNU Octave.
There are several examples of online Octave interfaces. Octave Online is a new interface that supports a live prompt and an online editor. I am a member of the team developing Octave Online. You can find more examples of online Octave interfaces on the Octave wiki. The Octave mailing list is a good resource for prior online Octave projects.
We have developed a toolbox called Modelit Webserver Toolbox that should allow you to do this. We use this ourselves to run a Routing algorithm implemented in Matlab for an online route planner (the link is on our website). You can use the toolbox in conjunction with Tomcat and Matlab (2006b and up) or a compiled Matlab executable. The toolbox also provides a mechanism to run several jobs in parallel.
Related
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.
After years of no programming I am on my way to learn C++ on my Mac OSX. My eager goal is the creation of an algorithmic/automatic trading software for use with Interactive Brokers.
Now, I downloaded their API for Mac OSX and the docs. But I get the notion that the API for MacOSX is only for usage with Java?
I case I am wrong: I would be very happy if someone could help me with a few lines of C++ for usage on the IB-API, e. g. opening a session or loading marketdata for a security?
Btw, I did that with R and after having found some examples it was quite easy to use.
Thanks.
IB also provides the so called "Posix C++ API" which should work on MacOSX (It's stupidly included within the twsapi_unixmac_*.jar archive).
There is an autotools based project (twsapi) from this original IB code which builds fine on MacOSX, see
https://github.com/rudimeier/twsapi
A more exciting example of how to use twsapi in practice you may find in the twstools
project there:
https://github.com/rudimeier/twstools
Another wrapper directly around the C++ Posix version that compiles and runs on many platforms is TwsApiC++.
You can find it at https://github.com/JanBoonen/TwsApiCpp
It also includes some examples.
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 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.
I havent used flash or action script much. I am planning a small project that i'd like to be online via flash but i'd like to reuse the code in my c/c++ projects
Is there a script language i can use? i am thinking lua or python. After googling i found flua which is incomplete and jython. Can i use java in flash? would it be a good idea to use python in java which is ran with flash?
Have you taken a look at Alchemy?
With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform. Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.
Have you looked at Haxe? http://www.haxe.org
The Haxe compiler can produce swf files, JavaScripts and other, with a language that resembles ActionScript or JavaScript more or less, depending on what language details you care about.
Here's this nice teaser from the haxe site: "Currently in testing, with the right build of Haxe from Hugh Sanderson, you can now output your Haxe applications to pure C++ source code, complete with makefiles."
But no, I don't know about using Java inside a Flash. You mean the Flash app executing Java while it's running? or using Java to create a Flash app?
There's no way to embed Java within a Flash movie. If you're creating a SWF that will display in a browser then you're restricted to Actionscript. You could create a Java applet, load it in the same page, and use javascript to communicate between the two, though I wouldn't recommend that.
If you're using a projector to create an EXE then you may be able to load and use C++ dlls, though I've never attempted this.