webcc

A lightweight C++ REST and SOAP client and server library based on Boost.Asio.

Quick Start

REST Server

Suppose you want to create a book server, and provide the following operations with RESTful API:

• Query books based on some criterias.
• Add a new book.
• Get the detailed information of a book.
• Update the information of a book.
• Delete a book.

The first two operations can be implemented by deriving from webcc::RestListService:

class BookListService : public webcc::RestListService {
 protected:
  // Query books based on some criterias.
  // GET /books?<query>
  bool Get(const webcc::UrlQuery& query,
           std::string* response_content) override;

  // Add a new book.
  // POST /books
  // The new book's data is attached as request content in JSON format.
  bool Post(const std::string& request_content,
            std::string* response_content) override;
};

The others, derive from webcc::RestDetailService:

// The URL is like '/book/{BookID}', and the 'url_sub_matches' parameter
// contains the matched book ID.
class BookDetailService : public webcc::RestDetailService {
 protected:
  // Get the detailed information of a book.
  bool Get(const std::vector<std::string>& url_sub_matches,
           const webcc::UrlQuery& query,
           std::string* response_content) override;

  // Update the information of a book.
  bool Put(const std::vector<std::string>& url_sub_matches,
           const std::string& request_content,
           std::string* response_content) override;

  // Delete a book.
  bool Delete(const std::vector<std::string>& url_sub_matches) override;
};

As you can see, all you have to do is to override the proper virtual functions which are named after HTTP methods.

The detailed implementation is out of the scope of this document, but here is an example:

bool BookDetailService::Get(const std::vector<std::string>& url_sub_matches,
                            const webcc::UrlQuery& query,
                            std::string* response_content) {
  if (url_sub_matches.size() != 1) {
    return false;
  }
  const std::string& book_id = url_sub_matches[0];

  // Get the book by ID from database.
  // Convert the book details to JSON string.
  // Assign JSON string to response_content.
}

Last step, bind the services and run the server:

webcc::RestServer server(8080, 2);

server.Bind(std::make_shared<BookListService>(), "/books", false);
server.Bind(std::make_shared<BookDetailService>(), "/book/(\\d+)", true);

server.Run();

Please see the example/rest folder for the complete examples (including the client).

Build Instructions

A lot of C++11 features are used, e.g., std::move. But C++14 is not required. (It means that you can still build webcc using VS2013 on Windows.)

CMake 3.1.0+ is required as the build system. But if you don't use CMake, you can just copy the src/webcc folder to your own project then manage it by yourself.

C++ Boost should be 1.66+ because Asio made some broken changes to the API in 1.66.

Build Options

The following CMake options determine how you build the projects. They are quite self-explanatory.

option(WEBCC_ENABLE_LOG "Enable console logger?" ON)
option(WEBCC_ENABLE_SOAP "Enable SOAP support (need pugixml)?" ON)
option(WEBCC_BUILD_UNITTEST "Build unit test?" ON)
option(WEBCC_BUILD_EXAMPLE "Build examples?" ON)

If WEBCC_ENABLE_SOAP is ON, pugixml (already included) is used to parse and compose XML strings.

Build On Linux

Create a build folder under the root (or any other) directory, and cd to it:

mkdir build
cd build

Generate Makefiles with the following command:

cmake -G"Unix Makefiles" \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_LOG=ON \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_SOAP=ON \
    -DWEBCC_BUILD_UNITTEST=OFF \
    -DWEBCC_BUILD_EXAMPLE=ON \
    ..

Feel free to change the build options (ON or OFF). Then make:

$ make -j4