Web application structure

Hi all,

I want to use C++ to develop a Web Application where performance is pretty much everything...Would just like to know how someone goes about using C++ in such an environment...e.g. how does Google use C++ for google.com...

I briefly considered using Ruby with the Rails framework but given that I've coded in C++ before, I really would like to work with it...

Thanks,

Farooq

Do you want us to tell you about C++ network programming or do you want us to hypothesize where C++ fits into Google's master scheme to take over the world? Some more details about what you want to do can help us to help you.

ha ha...sorry about that...

I require maximum server side processing of image data...so like with html and scripting: I would execute a script on the server side using a POST...

I want to know how something similar might be done, where my browser actually executes a C++ programme on the server (which does all my processing) and returns the data back to the browser...

I guess I'm looking for defined ways of structuring such a web application, not a hack to accomplish it...like I said, performance would mean everything here and I dont' think PHP etc will be able to handle it...

Thanks!

Farooq

you could use C++ for this, but generally it'd mean writing a mod for apache or something similiar. To be honest, you'd be better off with a language/library that's designed for this purpose (e.g. Ruby, mod-Python, ASP.net)

Perl CGI ftw.

You actually can just write CGI programs in C++, whatever others here tell you. But it's tiresome, as nearly no support libraries exist.

I think the best thing to do is write the application in the scripting language of your choice, then, if it's not fast enough, write an extension to that language in C++ that provides the performance-critical functionality. For example, extending Python with Boost.Python works pretty well.

thanks a lot for your replies...so basically I could do all of the front-end work in one of the scripting languages and then call C++ functions for computationally intensive tasks....i just wanted to see if there was a framework already available that helped in such a setup...

On another note, I would very much like to code the server side in C++ not only because I've worked in it a bit before but also because it has a reputation for producing the fastest applications (the usual developer competency disclaimers apply)

Thanks!

Farooq

I've tried the same thing, although tried to just make all the CGI 'scripts' in straight c++. It took me a while to get going as I was trying to learn c++ at the same time, but it's not that more complex than writing it in a scripting language that you don't already know.

Once you have written yourself a CGI class (I couldn't find any decent ones on google - and that wasn't that long ago - so I emulated the perl cgi class since it has such a useful interface) and have a regex class (PCRE is good; Boost.Regex is better then that's pretty much it. Database interaction is a bit of a pain though (at least it is on Windows - I still can't get mysql++ working on it): that's the only real stopping ground since I'm still deciding on what the most efficient way of getting to the DB via c++ is, but it's by no means impossible to make your own interface (I got stuck on prepared statements for a short epoch, mind).

I'm still working on figuring it out, but IMHO some useful classes are a User class (to handle all user stuff - possibly by accessing lower-level classes, like a UserOptions class); a chrono namespace (for script timing, formatting of dates/times, etc); a Session class (db-based artificial persistent connections - logging, usage limiting, etc); a crypto namespace (for all the obvious important security stuff) and a Contact class (for e?mailing users, etc).

There's a billion more possibilities, but the stuff I put in the code sections above are all completely generic so they (seem to) work with all applications. With them I honestly don't even think it's that hard (read: any more complex than using php/perl/python, maybe even easier) to code apps and to me it seems far cleaner to be doing it in c++.


Then again, you could just listen to everyone else and just give up on the idea altogether.

For DB access in C++, the SOCI library is a modern and nice approach.

Cgicc library is small free library for CGI programming, can be downloaded from www.freshmeat.net.

thanks a lot all of you...I guess I am influenced by my previous work in C++ and it's high performance reputation...The best way now would be to use Python or Ruby on Rails to structure the web app. and then use C++ for any functions I feel cannot be handled by the respective languages...

Thanks a lot again for all the suggestions...