UPDATE: Contrary to what is written below—which we keep for posterity—DMBCS has migrated all of our projects from C++ to Rust, and the axum crate provides all our web server functionality. Thus this project is now considered deprecated, and is no longer developed or supported.

DMBCS Micro-Server C++ Library

At DMBCS we like to do things in certain ways: all our code takes the form of C++17 (or, lately, C++20) libraries built with GNU autotools, providing user interaction through HTTP/HTML5/CSS3/EcmaScript web interfaces. It is thus a common requirement that our code links against a library of classes which implement the HTML paradigm and provide the TCP/IP plumbing to allow applications to easily take the form of self-contained web servers. At DMBCS we use NGINX at top-level to coordinate the set of such micro-servers which make up a complete web site.

The library has been under constant development for over twenty years (yes, really), and in heavy production use. The code-base hasnʼt quite been brought up to our expectations of full production-quality code yet (it has always been a project on the side of other things), and so we still regard it as beta-quality software. We expect this situation to change in the near future.

Simplest example

The following is provided as the simplest code to demonstrate use of the dmbcs-micro-server library, not to inform of any coding style or quality system approach. We assume a standard GNU system with recent make, bash, gcc, etc.

Start with the HTML file calc.html

  <html>
    <head><title>Multiplier</title></head>
    <body><h1>Multiplier</h1>
      <form action="compute" method="GET" id="calc">
        <input type="text" name="arg_1"/> x <input type="text" name="arg_2"/>
              = <input type="text" name="result" value="[result/]"></input>
        <br>
        <input type="submit">CALCULATE</input>
      </form>
    </body>
  </html>

And the C++ source file calc.cc

  #include <dmbcs-micro-server.h>

  using namespace DMBCS::Micro_Server;


  /*  This function both serves up the basic HTML page, and
   *  performs the multiplication and injects the result into the
   *  HTML. */
  void  home_page  (Query_String const &query, int const socket)
  {
      Hyper_Tags  tags;

      tags.add  ("result",
                 query.get ("arg_1", 0) * query.get ("arg_2", 0));

      Http_Server::return_html (socket,
                                substitute (tags,
                                            slurp_file ("calc.html")));
  }


  int main ()
  {
     auto server  =  Http_Server {2022,
                                  { {"", home_page},
                                    {"compute", home_page} }};

     for (;;)   tick  (server, 1000000);

     return 0;
  }

then the makefile

  CXXFLAGS = `pkg-config --cflags dmbcs-micro-server`
  LDFLAGS  = `pkg-config  --libs  dmbcs-micro-server`

Then at the command line type

        make calc
        ./calc

then point a browser at http://localhost:2022/ and use the simple calculator (donʼt try to do anything funny: the code has been kept deliberately simple and doesnʼt do any error checking). Note that an answer can be obtained directly with a URL like http://localhost:2022/compute?arg_1=3&arg_2=4.

Download

The dmbcs-micro-server source code is managed with GIT (configured with autotools, built with make and a good C++23 compiler). Type

git clone https://khleedril.org/forge/dmbcs/micro-server.git dmbcs-micro-server

at the command line to obtain a copy.

If you use Guix for your package management, you can mention our channel in your $HOME/.config/guix/channels.scm, and then (after guix pull)

guix install dmbcs-micro-server

Documentation

The documentation, as yet incomplete, comes with the source, and you can also read it here.

Contact

Please click here if you wish to send us a message.

Mailing list

If you would like to receive e-mail notices of matters arising about this library, you may request this through the contact form.

Contribution to development

We will happily consider contributions to the source code if you provide the address of a GIT repository we can pull from, and will consider all bug reports and feature requests, although onward development of this library is not a primary concern of ours.

Donations

Like all free (as in free beer) FOSS software, the amount of time that can be devoted to this project is limited by the needs of the developers to otherwise earn a living wage. Contributions to the project will make a difference to the amount of resource available to it. If possible, please contribute by Bitcoin to the address 1PWHez4zT2xt6PoyuAwKPJsgRznAKwTtF9, or Ethereum to 0xd306277ef68026a64bdd8c99ac7f19f21b3da6fb. For other forms of donation please message us at the contact form at https://khleedril.org/dmbcs/contact. If you want paid support, or want to pay for specific features to be developed, DMBCS will most likely be happy to oblige!

Thank you.

This page was last modified December, 2023

This page is https://khleedril.org/dmbcs/micro-server.