Thread: 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

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.

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...