webcc

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

Please turn to our Wiki for more tutorials and guides.

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:
  // Get a list of books based on query parameters.
  void Get(const webcc::UrlQuery& query,
           webcc::RestResponse* response) final;

  // Create a new book.
  // The new book's data is attached as request content in JSON format.
  void Post(const std::string& request_content,
            webcc::RestResponse* response) final;
};

The others, derive from webcc::RestDetailService:

// The URL is like '/books/{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.
  void Get(const webcc::UrlSubMatches& url_sub_matches,
           const webcc::UrlQuery& query,
           webcc::RestResponse* response) final;

  // Update a book.
  void Put(const webcc::UrlSubMatches& url_sub_matches,
           const std::string& request_content,
           webcc::RestResponse* response) final;

  // Delete a book.
  void Delete(const webcc::UrlSubMatches& url_sub_matches,
              webcc::RestResponse* response) final;
};

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:

void BookDetailService::Get(const webcc::UrlSubMatches& url_sub_matches,
                            const webcc::UrlQuery& query,
                            webcc::RestResponse* response) {
  if (url_sub_matches.size() != 1) {
    // Invalid URL.
    response->status = webcc::HttpStatus::kBadRequest;
    return;
  }

  const std::string& book_id = url_sub_matches[0];

  // Get the book by ID from, e.g., database.
  // ...

  if (<NotFound>) {
    response->status = webcc::HttpStatus::kNotFound;
  } else {
    response->content = <JsonStringOfTheBook>;
    response->status = webcc::HttpStatus::kOK;
  }
}

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>(), "/books/(\\d+)", true);

server.Run();

Please see example/rest_book_server for the complete example.

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, though some changes are needed to make it work. See Wiki/Integrate Into Your Project for more details.

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_SOAP "Enable SOAP support (need pugixml)?" ON)
option(WEBCC_ENABLE_SSL "Enable SSL/HTTPS support (need OpenSSL)?" OFF)
option(WEBCC_ENABLE_UNITTEST "Build unit test?" ON)
option(WEBCC_ENABLE_EXAMPLES "Build examples?" ON)

set(WEBCC_ENABLE_LOG 1 CACHE STRING "Enable logging? (0:OFF, 1:ON)")
set(WEBCC_LOG_LEVEL 2 CACHE STRING "Log level (0:VERB, 1:INFO, 2:WARN, 3:ERRO or 4:FATA)")

Options WEBCC_ENABLE_LOG and WEBCC_LOG_LEVEL together define how logging behaves. See Wiki/Logging for more details.

If WEBCC_ENABLE_SOAP is 1, 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" \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~ \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_LOG=1 \
    -DWEBCC_LOG_LEVEL=2 \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_SOAP=ON \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_SSL=OFF \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_UNITTEST=OFF \
    -DWEBCC_ENABLE_EXAMPLES=ON \
    ..

Feel free to change the build options. CMake variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX defines where to install the output library and header files. The default is /usr/local.

If everything is OK, then you can build with make:

$ make -j4  # or -j8, depending on how many CPU cores you have.

Then install:

$ make install