CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++web-services
user1254893
user1254893

Reputation: 537

Efficient C++ software stack for web development

What C++ software stack do developers use to create custom fast, responsive and not very resource hungry web services?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1180

Answers (2)

Artyom
Artyom

Reputation: 31223

I'd recommend you to take a look on CppCMS:

http://cppcms.com

It exactly fits the situation you had described:

  • performance-oriented (preferably web service) software stack
  • for C++ web development.
  • It should have a low memory footprint
  • work on UNIX (FreeBSD) and Linux systems
  • perform well under high server load and be able to handle many requests with great efficiency
  • [as I plan to use it in a virtual environment] where resources will be to some extent limited.

So far I have only come across Staff WSF, Boost, Poco libraries. The latter two could be used to implement a custom web server...

The problem that web server is about 2% of web development there are so much stuff to handle:

  • web templates
  • sessions
  • cache
  • forms
  • security-security-security - which is far from being trivial

And much more, that is why you need web frameworks.

Upvotes: 4

gbjbaanb
gbjbaanb

Reputation: 52659

You could write an apache module, and put all your processing code in there.

Or there's CppCMS, or Treefrog or for writing web services (not web sites) use gSOAP or Apache Axis

But ultimately, there's no "easy to use framework" because C++ developers like to build apps from smaller components. There's no Ruby-style framework, but there is all manner of libraries for handling xml or whatever, and Apache offers the http protocol bits in the module spec so you can build up your app quite happily using whatever pieces make sense to you. Now whether there's a market for bundling this up to make something easier to use is another matter.

Personally, the best web app system I wrote (for a company) used a very think web layer in the web server (IIS and ASP, but this applies to any webserver, use php for example) that did nothing except act as a gateway to pass the data from the requests through to a C++ service. The C++ service could then be written completely as a normal C++ command line server with well-defined entry points, using as thin an RPC system as possible (shared memory, but you may want to check out ZeroMQ), which not only increased security but allowed us to easily scale by shifting the services to app servers and running the web servers on different hardware. It was also really easy to test.

Upvotes: 3

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