Calling c/c++ library from webserver

Question

I am pretty new to web programming.I am developing a HTML5 based user interface which is supposed to use a middle ware written in C/C++.How can I do this? I do not want to use any browser specific feature/library to communicate with the middle ware. Can we do the same at the server side and then send back the information to the browser? If so how can I achieve this communication with the middle ware at the server side?

Thanks in advance for the reply.

Note : I am planning to use Tomcat as the server in loop back.

Answer 1

As suggested above, you could use CGI (eg, perl scripts) as a middle-man between the Tomcat server and your C++ middleware. What I also think might work well, and am planning on using myself in the near future, is to use boost::asio, and take the example HTTP server and modify it to use your middleware. You could then communicate between the Tomcat server and the C++ server using AJAX with JSON.

Answer 2

There is also something called pion server http://www.pion.org/projects/pion-network-library

It allows you to write the entire server in your own C++, with most of the common tasks abstracted away.

Answer 3

The Wt "web toolkit" library (pronounced "witty") may be of interest. Essentially all web-aspects are taken care of this, so absolutely no middleware. Here is an intro, quoting from the website:

The API is widget-centric and uses well-tested patterns of desktop GUI development tailored to the web. To the developer, it offers abstraction of web-specific implementation details, including client-server protocols, event handling, graphics support, graceful degradation (or progressive enhancement), and URL handling.

Unlike many page-based frameworks, Wt was designed for creating stateful applications that are at the same time highly interactive (leveraging techinques such as WebSockets and Ajax to their fullest) and accessible (supporting plain HTML browsers), using automatic graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. Things that are natural and simple with Wt would require an impractical amount of effort otherwise: switching widgets using animations, while being perfectly indexed by search robots with clean URLs, or having a persistent chat widget open throughout, that even works in legacy browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

It can run with its own web server (based on a Boost component) or be linked against standard web server libraries.

I wrote a short blog post about how to integrate it with another C++ component I wrote ( RInside , which permits to embed R inside C++ apps) and by joining the two, I had a simple 'webapp' exporting R functionality to the web.

You can further enhance it via Javascript but that is something I have not looked into in any detail.