libcurl VS C++ REST SDK

Another example is curl. curl fetches or sends information from or to another computer. Seems like a small deal. Until you browse this tiny sample of who uses it. Everything from TVs, cars, nuclear fusion experiments, Playstations, mobile phone infrastructure, Microsoft Windows, printers, Spotify, Siemens telecommunications, digital photo frames and...NASA. curl is free software.

Learned about curl https://curl.se/ and played around with postman https://www.postman.com/ some more.

sounds like a job for curl or wget

https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz-vulns/tree/main/vulns/cur...

https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/68ffe6c17d6e44b459d60805...

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/25084/Haxx-Curl.html?vend...

Instead of only "thinking a lot about text-based browsers", I have been actively using them on a daily basis for the past 26 years.

Make of this what you will as I am a dumb end user not a genius "developer". I am glad that Links does not use libcurl and that it has its own "bespoke" HTML rendering. In all this time, I still have yet to see any other program produce better rendering of HTML tables as text. I have had few if any problems with Links versions. I am quite good at "breaking" software and for me Links has been quite robust. The source code is readable for me and I have been able to change or "fix" things I do not like, then quickly recompile. Recently I fixed a version of the program so that a certain semantic link would not be shown in Wikipedia pages. No "browser extension" required.

Links' rendering has managed to keep up with the evolution of HTML and web design sufficiently for me. Despite the enormous variation in HTML acrosse the www, there are very few cases where the rendering is unsatisfactory.^1 I cannot say the same for other attempts at text-only clients. W3C's libwww-based line-mode browser still compiles and works,^2 although I would not be satisifed with its rendering. Nor would I be satisfied with edbrowse, or something simpler such as mynx.^3

I use Links primarily for reading and printing HTML. I use a variety of TCP clients for making HTTP requests, including djb's tcpclient which I am quite sure beats libcurl any day of the week in terms quality, e.g., the programming skill level of the author and the care with which it was written. This non-libcurl networking code is relatively small and does not need oss-fuzz. I do not intentionally use libcurl. It is too large and complex for my tastes. For TLS, I mainly use stunnel and haproxy.

1. One rare example I can recall is https://archive.is

2. https://github.com/w3c/libwww

3. https://github.com/SirWumpus/ioccc-mynx

I discovered this the hard way. I decided to use the Projucer to export my audio plug-in project into Xcode. While trying to link curl for cpp and base64 into my project, I found it wouldn't build! I needed to link both of these libraries to be able to use Dolby.io's Media APIs within a C++ environment. At first, I tried to add the build instructions directly into Xcode, but I found that the settings were not saving each time I launched my project, that's when I found out the Projucer handles all the build instructions for you.

This test does not pass! Not because we're TDD-ing this and the implementation doesn't exist. The endpoint does respond as expected if you hit it from curl or another way.

E.g. tools like curl or jq are remarkably useful. You can/should use them while debugging. But you probably used them while building and testing the feature. So you would already be familiar with them and should have some sense of what they do. I want to focus on tools that you would mostly reach for when debugging. In that sense, tools like SDKMan etc. also make no sense here.

After messing with curl, I felt the need to have some friendlier way to test the API, besides writing some shell scripts or Python code, so non-technical people could also test with ease. Hoppscotch came to the rescue.

https://github.com/microsoft/cpprestsdk (concerned about being maintenance mode -> production?)

While it's not based on Boost Asio or Beast, Microsoft maintains a SDK for developing REST api's using C++, aptly named the C++ REST SDK. Here you can find the Github page. It pretty much covers everything you'd come to expect from a modern webserver package. It does come with a steep learning curve however.

I never thought I'd laud microsoft on open source software but this has certainly made my life easier... I mean come on, MIT licensed and everything...

https://github.com/microsoft/cpprestsdk

Assuming you want to make a REST API check this out: https://github.com/Microsoft/cpprestsdk

>But is it truly practical to use in 'higher-abstraction' apps like web or mobile?

Yes absolutely. Once you become familiar with the language the barrier is not that high. Familiarity trumps everything else.

That said, since i am not a Web/mobile developer i had collected some resources to help me learn how to use C++ for Web/Mobile apps, you may find it useful;

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/cross-platform-mobile-and-w...

https://github.com/Microsoft/cpprestsdk

https://medium.com/@ivan.mejia/modern-c-micro-service-implem...

I was starting a project that needs to read data with rest API and I'd like to use cpprestsdk from Microsoft. But it's readme says that's in maintenance mode and it's not recommended for new projects... I'd like to know why it's in maintenance mode, and if it will be abandoned. Also, if there's some equivalent library for cpp, instead of creating the business logic from scratch, i.e. with boost::beast.

So, if you're going that route, you can use one of the many HTTP wrappers around Boost::ASIO or something purpose-built like Pistache or Casablanca.