| Authors: | André Caron |
|---|---|
| Contact: | andre.l.caron@gmail.com |
| Version: | 0.1 |
| Date: | 2011-07-18 |
This library is a simple C++ wrapper for the C library http-parser [1]
(This code was derived from the HTTP parser code in NGINX). http-parser is
a simple HTTP streaming parser (for those of you familiar with XML, it works
much like a SAX parser). It knows nothing of sockets or streams. You feed it
data and it invokes registered callbacks to notify of available data. Because
http-parser operates at the very lowest level, it does not buffer data or
allocate memory dynamically. This library attempts to make that library easily
usable by C++ programs by interpreting those callbacks and buffering data where
needed.
| [1] | https://github.com/ry/http-parser. |
The API for defined classes is documented using Doxygen [2]. You will need to run Doxygen from the project source folder to generate the output HTML.
| [2] | http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/ |
Compiled HTML documentation for official releases is available online. Check the project page.
This project does not distribute the code to http-parser directly. To fetch
the entire source code, make sure you fetch submodules [3] too:
$ git clone ... $ cd httpxx $ git submodule init $ git submodule update
| [3] | http://book.git-scm.com/5_submodules.html |
http-parser itself has no dependencies and compiles with C++ compilers.
httpcxx uses only standard library facilities (namely std::string and
std::map) and introduces no additional dependencies.
The code should compile as is under a standard-compliant C++03 implementation.
A good memory allocation policy is important in server programs, which typically
run for a long time and suffer from memory fragmentation. httpcxx does its
best to avoid repeated allocation, but it needs a little help on your part.
http::Request and http::Response parser object allocate memory as
required because they buffer different parts of the incoming HTTP
request/response in std::string instances. However, they are implemented
carefully as to use the growing property of std::string [4] to their
advantage. In particular, you may re-use http::Request and
http::Response parser objects for parsing multiple request/response objects
using their .clear() method. This method marks all header lengths as 0 but
keeps the instances as well as the map. All this ensures that parsers avoid
repeated memory allocation.
| [4] | std::string instances keep the allocated memory buffer even when you
resize them such that their length decreases. In particular,
std::string::clear() marks the string length as 0 but keeps the allocated
buffer. |
Check out the sample programs in the demo/ subfolder.
