Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 55 views

    Foreword: Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework

    Uploaded by

    Greenhouse Mice
    Nanogear is a proposed C++ web framework under development. It aims to provide modern web development capabilities to C++ programmers. The framework will include modules for REST APIs, HTTP implementation, a server, CLI, database abstraction, templating and Wt integration. It will depend on Boost and be licensed under GPLv3. The goal is to eliminate barriers to web development in C++ and allow programmers to leverage their C++ skills in this domain. The framework is being created by 18-year old Italian developer Lorenzo Villani based on his experience building web applications in C++.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Foreword: Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework

    Uploaded by

    Greenhouse Mice
    55 views4 pages
    Nanogear is a proposed C++ web framework under development. It aims to provide modern web development capabilities to C++ programmers. The framework will include modules for REST APIs, HTTP implementation, a server, CLI, database abstraction, templating and Wt integration. It will depend on Boost and be licensed under GPLv3. The goal is to eliminate barriers to web development in C++ and allow programmers to leverage their C++ skills in this domain. The framework is being created by 18-year old Italian developer Lorenzo Villani based on his experience building web applications in C++.

    Original Title

    nanogear_whitepaper

    Copyright

    © Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Nanogear is a proposed C++ web framework under development. It aims to provide modern web development capabilities to C++ programmers. The framework will include modules for REST APIs, HTTP implementation, a server, CLI, database abstraction, templating and Wt integration. It will depend on Boost and be licensed under GPLv3. The goal is to eliminate barriers to web development in C++ and allow programmers to leverage their C++ skills in this domain. The framework is being created by 18-year old Italian developer Lorenzo Villani based on his experience building web applications in C++.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    55 views4 pages

    Foreword: Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework

    Uploaded by

    Greenhouse Mice
    Nanogear is a proposed C++ web framework under development. It aims to provide modern web development capabilities to C++ programmers. The framework will include modules for REST APIs, HTTP implementation, a server, CLI, database abstraction, templating and Wt integration. It will depend on Boost and be licensed under GPLv3. The goal is to eliminate barriers to web development in C++ and allow programmers to leverage their C++ skills in this domain. The framework is being created by 18-year old Italian developer Lorenzo Villani based on his experience building web applications in C++.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 4

    Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework

    Foreword
    This document is about nanogear an under-development C++ Web Framework. Ideas in this document came after developing a web application in C++ called Kexi Web Forms.

    Introducing Nanogear
    It's a matter of fact. There are no modern, open source, easy to use C++ web development frameworks around (with the notable exception of Wt1 which is not a framework but rather a library, but it has different scopes than the ones presented in this document).

    Architectural details
    The framework should be designed as a set of loosely-coupled, independent and highly reusable components, so that it can be used outside the Web-side context. It should allow the creation of resource-oriented applications out-of-the-box with ease. The framework should contain the following essential modules:

    REST API: RESTful applications are a simple and smart way to provide web services. The framework should provide a module representing all REST concepts (Resource, Representation, Connectors, etc). REST HTTP Implementation: Implementation of the REST API above using HTTP as transport protocol Server: The server which can be used to deploy REST-based applications. CLI Shell: A command-line driven interface to initialize a project and create all the needed boilerplate just like the other major web application frameworks DB Library: A rather simple database abstraction library using Table Gateway Pattern and Row Gateway Pattern (investigate Active Record Pattern2). Template Engine: An easy-to-use template engine with a not-so-complex language supporting conditionals, looping and STL containers traversing. Wt (Web toolkit) adapter: A set of adapter classes to ease the development of Wt-based applications. Easy deployment: Solutions to ease the deployment on etherogeneous environments. Integration with Ajax toolkits: Provide integration with most used Ajax toolkits.

    These are some useful tools which can be implemented after the first release:

    The following modules can be implemented later:

    1 http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern

    Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework


    Requirements:
    The framework MUST:

    Provide complete, exhaustive API documentation Provide a reference manual and examples Come with a comprehensive unit testing suite (either using boost's facilities, CppUnit or Google's testing framework) Look like an extension of the STL (no Java style camelCase function names, etc) Provide programs licensed under the GPL 3 and libraries licensed under LGPL 3

    The framework SHOULD:

    Depend on Boost: Boost is a comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed library. It contains all the stuff needed to develop the framework, it has a pretty liberal and GPL-Compatible license and it has strict requirements over code style and correctness thus ensuring maximum portability and compiler compatibility. It acts just like an extension of the STL with no extraneous style or coding conventions.

    The framework SHOULD NOT:

    Depend on Qt: despite being an excellent framework for creating desktop, graphical, applications it is not suitable for this purpose. It uses custom, STL-incompatible, data types everywhere, it's not transparently integrated with the STL and the Qt STL conversion functions add some unneeded overhead, thread safety is not guaranteed and it doesn't make use of exceptions. It makes massive use of on-the-fly machine-generated code (an example of this is the Signals/Slot mechanism and the helper code generated by moc) which is an unneeded complication.

    The framework MUST NOT:

    Provide components licensed under BSD-style licenses, these licenses kill the open source philosophy. The LGPL ensures that the application can be used in commercial environments for free and ensures that every contribution is kept open and gets in the upstream project. Be dual licensed: while I'm not against dual-licensing, I personally prefer to release the code for free even for commercial environment. A source of incomes could be selling services or getting investments from other companies.

    Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework


    Rationale
    The goal is to bring new and modern web technologies and development paradigms to the C++ world thus eliminating the myth that C++ is not suitable for web development. A solid framework would help C++ to gain power also in this area and allows programmers to not throw away their tools and practices.

    Nanogear: The C++ Web Framework


    About the author
    Lorenzo Villani is a 18-years old CS student living in Florence, Italy. He began using computers since the age of 5 with an Olivetti 386SX computer with Windows 3.0 installed. After some time he bought a 2nd-hand computer equipped with an old Pentium 133 MHz processor, 32mb of ram and 4gb of hard disk drive and Windows 95 installed. Nothing exceptional happened until he got his aunt's computer, a Pentium 2-MMX 450Mhz processor with 64mb of ram, an 8GB Hard drive and an ATI Rage video card equipped with 8mb of Vram. After using Windows 98 SE for some time he decided to try Linux. After buying Linux Magazine he put the RedHat Linux 7.2 CDs into the drive. After fighting with Anaconda (the Red Hat Linux system installer) he managed to get it running with KDE. After some time he switched to SuSE Linux 8.1 where he discovered the C and, some time later, the C++ programming languages. After that he tried several Linux distributions (including Debian, Gentoo and Slackware) and finally found in Fedora and RHEL (and CentOS) his best friends and went back learning C++. He's now a Fedora and KDE developer.3

    Document History

    Friday, 5 September 2008: Fourth revision 26 August 2008: Third revision Friday, 22 August 2008: Second revision Saturday, 17 August 2008: First revision

    Tuesday,

    3 Full LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzovillani

    You might also like