SimpleServer

This repository contains my implementation of a simple TCP/IP server in C++. I started fiddling with this to learn more about UNIX network programming.

See the initial blog post or its successor for additional information and comments.

How do I use the API?

The sources are meant to become an API when they grow up. At present there are two server implementations:

• qotd.cc contains a Quote of the Day service implementation
• echo.cc contains an echo service implementation

What's cool about it?

Good question. I wanted to encapsulate the C API for socket programming and make it more modern. So far, I did not really succeed, I guess. There is one cool thing at the moment: Requests are handled by specifying an arbitrary function object (yay, C++11). This function is then called asynchronously (yay, C++11 again!) whenever a new client is accepted. You can then send stuff to the client or whatever...

How do I run my own QOTD server?

That at least I may answer! After cloning this repository, please run the following commands:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../
$ make
$ ./qotd ../Quotes.txt

You can exit the server with CTRL+C. You can connect to your server like this:

$ nc localhost 1041

Why is the QOTD server not running under port 17?

Because most Linux distributions disallow opening ports below 1024 without root access or at least configuration changes. While I think that I am a trustworthy person, I do not presume that you want to compile this as root...

Thus, the QOTD server runs under port 1041, which is 1024+17 and hence quite clever.

How do I run my own echo server?

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../
$ make
$ ./echo

Note that the server runs under port 1031, which is 1024+7 and hence quite clever as well (see the answer to the previous question).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Uri London for very useful suggestions that helped improve the code.

Licence

The code is released under an MIT licence.