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Web Interfaces for C++ Introspection?

Posted by Cliff on from the tune-ups-while-still-executing dept.

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!"

6 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Why GUI by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. GLUI by tfinniga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Have you looked at GLUI?

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  3. Re:This question is odd.... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh and BTW, fork() and the unix process model sucks as a parallellism primitive.

    You're right...you should use pthreads or nptl instead.

    Some advice from someone who makes the same mistake every now and then...When you learn something in class, don't talk about it on Slashdot for at least a month. That'll give you a chance to think before you type.

    In the mean time, dissing UNIX around here is likely to get you modded "Troll."

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  4. What about ICE or CORBA? by motus · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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!

  5. Re:This question is odd.... by Omnifarious · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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  6. Re:This question is odd.... by GileadGreene · · Score: 4, Informative
    BTW, threads of any sort suck as a parallelism primitive. A better choice would be CSP-style process networks, as implemented in occam and C++CSP. Erlang implements a similar (but not identical) concurrency model.

    Why would you want to use a CSP-style concurrency model instead of threads? To quote from the occam compiler homepage:

    CSP has a compositional and denotational semantics, which means that it allows modular and incremental development (refinement) even for concurrent components. In turn, this means that we get no surprises when we run processes in parallel (since their points of interaction have to be explicitly handled by all parties to these interactions). This is simply not the case for standard threads-and-locks concurrency, which have no formal denotational semantics and by which we get surprised all the time.

    In layman's terms, you get concurrency that can be built up from easily understood pieces (instead of a monolithically concurrent system with locks scattered throughout the code), and an underlying theory of concurrency that lets you understand and analyze your design and ensure that it is, for example, free of deadlocks (I've personally created complex networks of 1000+ interacting processes in a dynamically evolving topology, with nary a hitch). And did I mentioned that the context-switching performance of most of these systems is amazingly good?