Can C++ be used as a server-side web development language?

Question

I'd like to get into web development using C++ as the "scripting language" on the server-side. My server infrastructure is *nix based, so doing web development in C++ on Azure is not applicable and C++/CLI ASP.NET is also not applicable.

Separate from legacy CGI applications, can web development be done using C++ ?

Thanks,

Scott

Answer 1

Absolutely.

There are even several frameworks for developing them, including Wt, cppcms, CSP, and others. FastCGI's mainline implementation is in C, and directly supports several languages, including C++.

Any programming language that can parse strings can be used in CGI or a servlet. Any language that can implement bindings with C libraries can also be used to develop modules for ISAPI- or Apache-compatible servers.

It's not particularly easy in C++, and good templating engines are few and far between, but it can be done.

Of course, the question of whether this is a good idea is another matter entirely. :)

Do note: Major websites like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and Facebook do use C++ for parts of their infrastructure. Realize, however, that Facebook compiles PHP to C++, Google only uses C++ for speed-critical systems, and Amazon.com only relatively recently switched away from Lisp (which angered some of their senior staff :).

Answer 2

Why not?

The OkCupid dating site is created with C++. There are probably other examples.

There's also a Qt-inspired toolkit for developing web applications with C++ called Wt.

Answer 3

in the beginning, it was quite common - the first web sites I worked on in the late 1990s were ISAPI extensions written in C++, and they worked quite well.

Answer 4

If you're planning to write your web application in C++, it would be total waste to then interface it as CGI.

My suggestion would be to build it asynchronous using Boost ASIO (Asynchronous I/O). With that you can build blazing fast web service (combine with nginx as a reverse-proxy and statics server for best effects); Combine that with template library like Wt and you're ready to serve tens of thousands request per second from a single server.

Whether this is practical alternative to dynamic language web framework is another issue.

Answer 5

The short answer is, ANYTHING can be used to write a webpage provide it can read the input, write interpretable output, and is executable by the webserver.

Technically, any language can be used as a CGI script provided it:

1. Interprets all the inputs and environment as presented by the server
2. Outputs in a known markup language (generally html)
3. Can be ran by the server

There are also other ways too. Perl has the ability to be built as a wrapper around c/c++ code, acting as an interpreting layer between the two (and this is not including perl modules that are flat out compiled as C).

Answer 6

It appears Microsoft thinks it can too. Check out Casablanca which is a new set of tooling for (it appears) Azure using C++.

Casablanca is a project to start exploring how to best support C++ developers who want to take advantage of the radical shift in software architecture that cloud computing represents.

Here’s what you get with Casablanca:

• Support for accessing REST services from native code on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 Consumer Preview by providing asynchronous C++ bindings to HTTP, JSON, and URIs
• A Visual Studio extension SDK to help you write C++ HTTP client side code in your Windows 8 Metro style app
• Support for writing native-code REST for Azure, including Visual Studio integration
• Convenient libraries for accessing Azure blob and queue storage from native clients as a first class Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature
• A consistent and powerful model for composing asynchronous operations based on C++ 11 features
• A C++ implementation of the Erlang actor-based programming model
• A set of samples and documentation

Answer 7

For PHP you can write your own C/C++ extensions and get good performance benefits that way. If I had a really CPU intensive part of my web application I would probably make a small C++ library that offloaded that processing to the extension and then returned the result back to the PHP and then the PHP outputs it to the browser.

The other thing people don't often consider is offloading certain CPU processing to the client side e.g. JavaScript/jQuery. If I've got a web server, I might need a a 3Ghz CPU to do CPU intensive processing for a particular function (maybe some data processing). My company is paying money for that server each month to keep it running. If I want to scale up operations for a 100 concurrent users running that CPU intensive task at the same time then maybe I need multiple CPUs and servers, increasing the cost to my business. If I offload that CPU intensive task to the client side, then each user that visits the website can do their own processing on the data and I don't have to increase my server capability therefore saving me money.

After all with all with the collective power of 100+ desktops/tablets/mobiles doing the processing for you that's a lot more power than your server sitting in a datacenter somewhere costing your business money each month to keep running. Potentially then all your server would be doing would be retrieving data from the database, serving content and a bit of pre/post processing and validation of the data before storing back in the database. Obviously you wouldn't make the client side code too CPU intensive which might block/freeze the web browser UI, you might fire off an AJAX request to the server, retrieve the data and then process the data asynchronously client-side, leaving the web-browser UI completely usable.