cpp-netlib is a collection of network related routines/implementations geared towards providing a robust cross-platform networking library. cpp-netlib offers the following implementations:

• Common Message Type -- A generic message type which can be used to encapsulate and store message related information, used by all network implementations as the primary means of data exchange.
• Network protocol message parsers -- A collection of parsers which generate message objects from strings.
• Adapters and Wrappers -- A collection of Adapters and wrappers aimed towards making the message type STL friendly.
• Network protocol client and server implementations -- A collection of network protocol implementations that include embeddable client and server types.

This library is released under the Boost Software License (please see http://boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt or the accompanying LICENSE_1_0.txt file for the full text.

You can find official release packages of the library at:

http://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib/downloads

The project contains submodules for some dependencies and some libraries. Once you have cloned cpp-netlib, you must update the submodules:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

To build the libraries and run the tests with CMake, you will need to have CMake version 2.8.10 or higher installed appropriately in your system.

$ cmake --version
cmake version 2.8.10

Inside the cpp-netlib directory, you can issue the following statements to configure and generate the Makefiles, and build the tests:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib-build # cmake is built out of source
$ cmake ~/cpp-netlib \ # we're assuming it's where cpp-netlib is
>       -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug     \
>       -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang     \
>       -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++

Once CMake is done with generating the Makefiles and configuring the project, you can now build the tests and run them:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib-build
$ make
$ make test

If for some reason some of the tests fail, you can send the files in Testing/Temporary/ as attachments to the cpp-netlib developers mailing list.

API documentation can be generated by running the following command:

$ cd ~/cpp-netlib-build
$ make doc

The HTML output can be found in the html subdirectory.

If you want to run the tests that come with cpp-netlib, there are a few things you will need. These are:

• A compiler (GCC 4.7.x, Clang 2.8, MSVC 2012)
• CMake
• OpenSSL headers (optional)

FreeBSD users can use the ports tree to install cpp-netlib:

$ cd /usr/ports/devel/cpp-netlib && make install clean

cpp-netlib is being developed with the git distributed SCM system. cpp-netlib is hosted on GitHub following the GitHub recommended practice of forking the repository and submitting pull requests to the source repository. You can read more about the forking process and submitting pull requests if you're not familiar with either process yet.

Because cpp-netlib is released under the Boost Software License it is recommended that any file you make changes to bear your copyright notice alongside the original authors' copyright notices on the file. Typically the copyright notices are at the top of each file in the project.

At the time of writing, there are no coding conventions being followed but if you write in the general style that is already existing in the project that would be greatly appreciated. Copious amounts of comments will be called out, but code that is not self-explanatory typically at least requires a rationale documentation in comments explaining "why" the code is written that way.

The main "upstream" repository and official release repository is maintained at http://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib. It is recommended that forks and pull requests be submitted to the upstream repository so that patches and other implementations can be curated by the project administrators.

In case you have any questions or would like to make feature requests, you can contact the development team through the developers mailing list or by filing issues at http://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib/issues.

You can reach the maintainers of the project through:

Dean Michael Berris ([email protected])

Glyn Matthews ([email protected])