C++ Network Library

Introduction

cpp-netlib is a collection of network related routines/implementations geared towards providing a robust cross-platform networking library. cpp-netlib offers the following implementations:

• Common Message Type -- A generic message type which can be used to encapsulate and store message related information, used by all network implementations as the primary means of data exchange.
• Network protocol message parsers -- A collection of parsers which generate message objects from strings.
• Adapters and Wrappers -- A collection of Adapters and wrappers aimed towards making the message type STL friendly.
• Network protocol client and server implementations -- A collection of network protocol implementations that include embeddable client and server types.

This library is released under the Boost Software License (please see http://boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt or the accompanying LICENSE_1_0.txt file for the full text.

Downloading cpp-netlib

You can find official release packages of the library at:

http://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib/downloads

Building and Installing

Since cpp-netlib is a header-only library, there is nothing to build. To install cpp-netlib, you can choose to copy the contents of the boost directory into an existing Boost¹ distribution or to a different location. All that is required is for projects that use cpp-netlib when building, have the directory where cpp-netlib is installed as part of the include paths.

The recommended installation procedure would be to follow the steps below:

# On Linux/Mac, consider the `$` character as the shell prompt
$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/include/cpp-netlib
$ sudo cp -r cpp-netlib/boost /usr/local/include/cpp-netlib

Now don't forget to add /usr/local/include/cpp-netlib in your project's compiler include directories to start using cpp-netlib in your projects.

Running Tests

If you want to run the tests that come with cpp-netlib, there are a few things you will need. These are:

• A compiler (GCC 4.x or Clang 2.8)
• A build tool (CMake² recommended, Boost.Build also an option)
• OpenSSL headers (optional with CMake, mandatory for Boost.Build)
• Python 2.6

Note

This assumes that you have the cpp-netlib distribution package unpacked somwhere in your home directory. This specifically assumes that you have cpp-netlib at the toplevel of your home directory.

Building with CMake

To build and run the tests with CMake, you will need to have CMake version 2.8 or higher installed appropriately in your system.

$ cmake --version
cmake version 2.8.1

Inside the cpp-netlib directory, you can issue the following statements to configure and generate the Makefiles, and build the tests:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib      # we're assuming it's where cpp-netlib is
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
>    -CMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang     \
>    -CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
>    .

Note

This uses the source directory as the build directory as well. At the time of this writing, cpp-netlib is meant to be tested in the same directory where the source files are, because of the way the tests depend on Python being installed and having access to Python scripts during the build.

Once CMake is done with generating the Makefiles and configuring the project, you can now build the tests and run them:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib
$ make
$ make test

If for some reason some of the tests fail, you can send the files in Testing/Temporary/ as attachments to the cpp-netlib developers mailing list.

Building with Boost.Build

If you don't already have Boost.Build set up on your system, follow the steps indicated in the Boost Getting Started Guide³ -- you will particularly want to copy the bjam executable to a directory that is already in your PATH so that you don't have to go hunting for it all the time. A good place to put it is in /usr/local/bin.

Building and running the tests can be as simple as doing the following:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib
$ bjam

Doing this will already build all the tests and run them as they are built. In case you encounter any problems and would like to report it to the developers, please do the following:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib
$ bjam 2>&1 >build-test.log

And then attach the build-test.log file to the email you will send to the cpp-netlib developers mailing list.

Hacking on cpp-netlib

cpp-netlib is being developed with the git distributed SCM system. cpp-netlib is hosted on GitHub following the GitHub recommended practice of forking the repository and submitting pull requests to the source repository. You can read more about the forking process and submitting pull requests if you're not familiar with either process yet.

Because cpp-netlib is released under the Boost Software License it is recommended that any file you make changes to bear your copyright notice alongside the original authors' copyright notices on the file. Typically the copyright notices are at the top of each file in the project.

At the time of writing, there are no coding conventions being followed but if you write in the general style that is already existing in the project that would be greatly appreciated. Copious amounts of comments will be called out, but code that is not self-explanatory typically at least requires a rationale documentation in comments explaining "why" the code is written that way.

The main "upstream" repository is the one hosted by the original maintainer of the project (Dean Michael Berris) at http://github.com/mikhailberis/cpp-netlib. The "official" release repository is maintained at http://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib -- which is a fork of the upstream repository. It is recommended that forks be made against the upstream repostory and pull requests be submitted against the upstream repository so that patches and other implementations can be curated by the original maintainer.

Contact and Commercial Support

In case you have any questions or would like to make feature requests, you can contact the development team through the developers mailing list or by filing issues at http://github.com/mikhailberis/cpp-netlib/issues.

You can reach the maintainers of the project through:

Dean Michael Berris
mikhailberis@gmail.com

Glyn Matthews

Mike Dickey

At this time, paid commercial support is available for cpp-netlib being offered by the maintainers. In case you have any questions, please feel free to contact any one of the maintainers above or anybody on the developers mailing list.

---

1. http://www.boost.org/↩

2. http://www.cmake.org/↩

3. http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_44_0/more/getting_started/index.html↩