- Open Source HTTP web servers in C/C++
- Python's resources for HTTP web servers
- Less academically used frameworks with good APIs such as Nodejs
Pros and Cons
In C/C++, I found two seemingly well-maintained libraries: Mongoose (C) and Pion Network Library (C++). One desired characteristic of the key server is that it is lightweight. At the very least, the Pion library seemed to take much longer to compile and had many more files involved. Mongoose, however, was just a pair of .h and .c files. Pion, using boost and possibly other C++ features, may have performance advantages over Mongoose, but for simplicity sake, I chose Mongoose over Pion.
(Additionally, Pion seems incredibly difficult to compile. On Ubuntu 12.04, I got furthest with compilation by installing boost 1.55, recompiling openssl with ./config shared, modifying makefiles to include -fPIC, and moving libssl.a to the directory Pion looked in. Even after copying all the boost files to where the old v1.48 ones were, there were still linking issues with boost when trying to compile a sample program)
Libraries in Python might be more developed than possible web server libraries in C/C++. For now, I chose Mongoose (C) because I didn't want to be slowed down by my lack of Python knowledge. Perhaps I will go back and use Python instead.
Something like Nodejs or Ruby on Rails seemed useful for developing a key server. However, we wouldn't have much control over the way certain protocols are implemented, and there could be hidden security issues or bugs. Working in C/C++/Python gives us control over implementation but opens doors up for our own bugs. Additionally, people in academia might frown upon the use of these newer, more "hip" technologies over languages everyone knows.
To be continued....
(Additionally, Pion seems incredibly difficult to compile. On Ubuntu 12.04, I got furthest with compilation by installing boost 1.55, recompiling openssl with ./config shared, modifying makefiles to include -fPIC, and moving libssl.a to the directory Pion looked in. Even after copying all the boost files to where the old v1.48 ones were, there were still linking issues with boost when trying to compile a sample program)
Libraries in Python might be more developed than possible web server libraries in C/C++. For now, I chose Mongoose (C) because I didn't want to be slowed down by my lack of Python knowledge. Perhaps I will go back and use Python instead.
Something like Nodejs or Ruby on Rails seemed useful for developing a key server. However, we wouldn't have much control over the way certain protocols are implemented, and there could be hidden security issues or bugs. Working in C/C++/Python gives us control over implementation but opens doors up for our own bugs. Additionally, people in academia might frown upon the use of these newer, more "hip" technologies over languages everyone knows.
To be continued....
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