What works for web dev in C++

Question

Hello Stackoverflow,

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 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

--jbar.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

There's the Wt Project. It uses a paradigm similar to Qt's signals/slots.

Answer 4

ATL Server is a library of C++ classes that allow developers to build internet based applications.

Answer 5

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

The ONLY problem is persistent database connections, or persistent anything, so your app would probably have to be the app server as well, so it's a daemon instead of a script that runs under Apache (for example).

Answer 6

ATL Server. It's open source too! And of course there is always ISAPI. Ah, the bad old days. :)

Answer 7

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?

Answer 8

Our web app backend is in C++ via CGI and we use Clearsilver templates along with the HDF that comes with it.

Answer 9

libapache2-mod-raii is a complete framework with builtin database connexion pools, sessions and all the stuffs that makes developping web applications enjoying !