C++ web service framework

Question

We are looking for a C++ Soap web services framework that support RPC, preferably open source. Any recommendations?

Answer 1

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ (WSO2 WSF/C++), a binding of WSO2 WSF/C into C++ is a C++ extension for consuming Web Services in C++.

http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/cpp

Apache Axis is an open source, XML based Web service framework. It consists of a Java and a C++ implementation of the SOAP server, and various utilities and APIs for generating and deploying Web service applications.

http://ws.apache.org/axis/

Answer 2

http://code.google.com/p/staff/

Staff is Web Service Framework for C++ (service/component and client-side)/JavaScript(client-side) based on Apache Axis2/C.

Open-source, released with Apache License V2.0.

Answer 3

Try the ffead-cpp framework, it provides in-built web-service support, rest, json and many other useful features.

Answer 4

We are using EasySoap (http://easysoap.sourceforge.net/)

Answer 5

While not FOSS another library is ATL Server library from Microsoft. It is C++ template based with some proprietary attributes by Microsoft. i.e. not standard C++

Answer 6

You can check out xmlbeansxx. This is a kind of lightweight, low level solution, compared to complete frameworks. This has advantages in some cases.

Invoking SOAP WebServices using xmlbeansxx Article

Code example is here: WsClient.cpp.

Answer 7

You could try gSOAP. Available under GPL and commercial licences.

Answer 8

I have used SWIG to make an interface from C++ to Java or Python and then used the typical web interface support for those languages.

Since Java and Python have reflection the web services frameworks that exist for them have a much easier time passing data around.

Threading wise if your C++ code is thread safe you can let the Java server manage the creation of threads for concurrent requests etc. and just call into your C++ code using JNI.

As a bonus you can test your C++ code from Python using these same SWIG interfaces.

Answer 9

I think the way to go is to write your service in C++ (I am assuming you did all the homework and there is a good reason you want to write in C++) and then front it using an RPC server. Use something like Thrift or Protobufs for a fast RPC implementation.

Now write your web frontend in the language of your choice - python would be mine - and make RPC calls to do all your heavy lifting.

Answer 10

POCO Remoting gives you a very simple way of creating web services in C++ by just annotating C++ class definitions with special comments and running a code generator over it. It's commercial, but delivered with full source code. A free eval version is available. Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc.

Answer 11

I concur with imjorge's answer and add that there's a C/C++ version of the Axis2 framework (a more flexible, extensible Axis) that does SOAP via RPC and all sorts of stuff including a bunch of the WS-* specs.

http://ws.apache.org/axis2/c/

Answer 12

Apache axis-c: Simple to use, but seems abandoned.. not even download pages is working for several months

WSOF WSFCPP: Fast quickstart dev, both binded or no-binded implementation, based on Apache AxisC and it seems most of the current developers of Apache Axis is from WSOF company. Besides the Great potential I've detected a memory leak.

I'm currently using Gsoap and It has very good performance. Gsoap "mixed notation" between old c style and some (bad?) practices for C++ bothers me some.. but this is only code-furniture.

POCO: Is a full-feature, modern (java?) like library. It is open source software, licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0. You'll have to write some things from scrach, but with great support, utility classes and etc great library.. Innovations from c++11+ with all boost initiatives + POCO + a new Build/Dependency system more "gradle like" will certainly bring c++ to new areas of development.