Question

I understand that as C++ isn’t dynamic, its not seen as a particularly great base to build a website, but I believe it partly falls down to support. Are there any servers that run C++ programs as like a root, for example node.js creates the server and then handles all requests that go to the root yet CGI (which I don’t want to use) is like a Php webpage, limited to slow Apache with annoying re-writes. Are there any C++ librarys that let you easily embed a server.

Answer 1

I recently (as in two days ago) had to rewrite a Java Jetty servlet in C++ (due to some JNI issues with OpenCV which I was also using). I had the exact same question as you and there’s no easy answer (I also didn’t want to use CGI). I suggest a couple of things:

Use boost, use boost, use boost.
Boost makes cross-platform deployment absolutely trivial and (dare I say it) fun! My dev machine is running Windows 7 but I had to deploy the server on a Linux server and boost made it incredibly easy.

Use an HTTP library
For my project, I found cpp-netlib, which makes writing servlets (if you can even call them that) very very easy. It offers access to request and response objects and even supports multithreading. Here’s the server example from their website:

#include <boost/network/protocol/http/server.hpp>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>

namespace http = boost::network::http;

struct hello_world;
typedef http::server<hello_world> server;

struct hello_world {
    void operator() (server::request const &request,
                     server::response &response) {
        std::string ip = source(request);
        response = server::response::stock_reply(
            server::response::ok, std::string("Hello, ") + ip + "!");
    }
};

int
main(int argc, char * argv[]) {

    if (argc != 3) {
        std::cerr << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " address port" << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }

    try {
        hello_world handler;
        server server_(argv[1], argv[2], handler);
        server_.run();
    }
    catch (std::exception &e) {
        std::cerr << e.what() << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }

    return 0;
}

Very neat-looking and (from what I’ve seen) it’s also very robust. Do not (do NOT) write your own HTTP 1.x implementation. I strongly advise against this because it’s a huge time investment and there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Do what works for you
If you need your server to have some hot-swappable parts, feel free to use an easy scripting language like LUA – otherwise, just be ready to compile at every iteration.