Web Interfaces for C++ Introspection?

Milo_Mindbender asks: "For a C++ application I'm working on I want to be able to pop up an interface to a class that will display all the 'tunable' parameters of the class and let me inspect/modify them, while the program is running. The catch is that I'm running on a minimal embedded OS with Open GL but no GUI library. Rather than porting a widget set or writing my own, I was thinking about having the application talk to a web browser, and then use the browser to display the GUI, take user input, and finally push the data back to the app. The classes have metadata that describes the public data locations/types so they can be accessed, but not being a web-wizard I'm not sure of the best way of generating the information I need to create the UI. My first thought is to generate HTML and push that to the browser, but it seems like there must be a better way than this, maybe someone has written a library specifically for doing this sort of thing? Any help/suggestions would be appreciated!"

Comments

Why GUI

[the eric conspiracy]

Any particular reason that it has to be a GUI? Something like an ncurses interface might be a lit easier.

What about ICE or CORBA?

[motus]

I think the challenge here is not how to represent the data visually (i.e. web/GUI), but how to control a C++ object from the remote application. For that puropse, I would suggest CORBA. You can define all controllable classes in CORBA IDL, compile it into C++ code and integrate with your existing application with minimum efforts. CORBA client should not necessarily written in C++ - it can be Java or Python, for example. I have very good experience with omniORB (http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/). It supports both C++ and Python, and I use a bunch of Python scripts as a test harness for my C++ CORBA services. Besides omniORB, there are lots other decent implementations of CORBA in many programming languages (http://www.omg.org/technology/corba/corbadownload s.htm).

PS. Good alternative to CORBA is ICE (http://www.zeroc.com/ice.html), which is basically the same thing as CORBA, and founded by one of the CORBA gurus. ICE has much better C++ mapping, and lots of other nice features.

Hope this helps!

Re:This question is odd....

[Omnifarious]

Well, I didn't assume he was asking how to write an http server. I assumed he was looking for introspection facilities like Java's, which C++ doesn't have. I wish it did. typeinfo could be that if any compiler manufacturer implemented a rich enough set of extensions to it.

It would be nice to get, at runtime, a list of pointers to functions a class supported as well as their names and type signatures. It would also be nice to be able to get a list of members and their types and their offsets from the beginning of the class.