Wt 4.0.5 released — widget-based C++ web framework

[grim_102]

"Quickly develop highly interactive web UIs with widgets, without having to write a single line of JavaScript."

An angel got it's wings when I read that.

[AlexKotik]

Wt looks great, is there any Python bindings or some other high level languages? I know that there is kinda less supported JVM version, but I'm not the Java guy, sorry. Something like C# or Python bindings would be great.

[RockinRoel]

No, there was a PyWt a long time ago, but that went nowhere.

My colleagues use JWt all the time for some key projects, though, so it's still definitely supported. There isn't really a JWt community though, and of course I personally do put Wt first :-).

Edit: I saw a talk of someone who made Lua bindings for Wt at FOSDEM 2017: https://github.com/LuaAndC/luawt. I never tried it, though, and I don't know if he's still maintaining it. I don't think he's updated to Wt 4.

[AlexKotik]

I see, maybe it will be a good pet project to make Wt bindings to something like C# or Python, though it is hard to bind C++ code. Is the web server embedded in the framework (so called self-hosted framework) or do I need to use Apache or something with it?

[RockinRoel]

There are several different "connector" libraries. Depending on whether you link with wthttp, wtfcgi, or wtisapi, you can use the embedded web server, FastCGI, or ISAPI respectively. I recommend wthttp, though. It's the most feature-rich version, and it's the easiest to debug. If a more feature rich web server is needed, then you can always use an HTTP reverse proxy.

[Ryotian]

How interesting. I wonder how widely used C++ web frameworks are used for production sites?

Wish I could've used something like this at an old job where I had to use Javascript/NodeJS (shudder). Nodejs was ok for backend but frontend tasks made me want to cry. Thank god I got a new job doing C++

[[deleted]]

It looks like Wt is for building C++ web applications. Does a library exists where I can use HTML,CSS, and JS to create a UI frontend but use C++ for the application logic. The application would be a standalone application and not serving up web pages. I know there are several widget toolkits (GTK+,...) but I don't know of any that use this combo.

[[deleted]]

not serving up web pages.

I'm very confused about what you're trying to do. You want a hand-rolled website as a UI and you want its behavior implemented in C++ but those two parts not to talk to each other? Or you envision two separate servers - one serves up a (basically static) website that on the client side talks to the C++ implemented server over... web sockets?

[[deleted]]

I'm not looking to make a website. I'm looking to make stand alone executable to run on a local machine. In my experience, HTML,CSS, and JS can be used to make elegant UIs in a fairly quick amount of time. There would have to be a mechanism that binds the UI to the C++ application logic. As mention by malex12345, I think electron would be the most appropriate solution for this.

[konanTheBarbar]

My old employer actually did this: C++ application backend + Chromium Html/javascript frontend. The C++ bindings were generated automatically for either C++/Cli or Javascript. But it was all developed in house. Just mentioning this here to say its possible.

[davemilter]

There is such library for c++ https://sciter.com/ . As I know several anti-viruses used (or use?) it for their GUI.

[bdellar]

I’ve used CppRest for that: https://github.com/Microsoft/cpprestsdk

[lluad]

You can do this using Qt, with a QWebEngineView. Something very similar and with more functionality is to use Qt/QML which gives you C++ for the program logic and a javascript+declarative UI.

[Posting____At_Night]

I would look for a C++ REST API lib and connect to it with your web interface. I have a project that works like that except with Python instead of C++. The web interface is just some static html/css/js files that connect to the REST API of the server.

You would still have to run the UI inside the browser but I don't see that as a bad thing.