qhttpengine/doc/index.md

QHttpEngine provides a simple set of classes for developing HTTP server applications in Qt.

The design goals of QHttpEngine include:

• Reliability - extremely exhaustive test suite ensures that bugs are caught as soon as they are introduced
• Flexibility - classes are designed for easy integration with existing Qt code
• Simplicity - everything is intentionally kept as simple as possible
• Usability - documentation is provided for all classes

All of QHttpEngine's functionality is included in a single monolithic library.

Requirements

QHttpEngine has been tested on the following combinations of compiler and operating system:

• Visual C++ 2013 on 32 and 64-bit editions of Windows
• g++ and Clang on Mac OS X
• g++ on i386, amd64, and ARM builds of Linux

QHttpEngine is designed in a portable way, so it may run on other compilers and operating systems than the ones listed above. However, the list represents the combinations that are actively tested and officially supported.

Building

QHttpEngine uses CMake for building the library. The library recognizes four options during configuration, all of which are disabled by default (the library is built as a shared library):

• BUILD_STATIC - build and link a static library instead of a shared library
• BUILD_DOC - (requires Doxygen) generates documentation from the comments in the source code
• BUILD_EXAMPLES - builds the sample applications that demonstrate how to use QHttpEngine
• BUILD_TESTS - build the test suite

It is also possible to override installation directories by customizing the BIN_INSTALL_DIR, LIB_INSTALL_DIR, INCLUDE_INSTALL_DIR, CMAKECONFIG_INSTALL_DIR, DOC_INSTALL_DIR, and EXAMPLES_INSTALL_DIR variables.

Usage

Serving static files from a directory is as simple as creating an instance of QHttpServer and QFilesystemHandler:

@code QFilesystemHandler handler("/var/www"); QHttpServer server(&handler); server.listen(); @endcode

QHttpEngine can also be used to easily add an HTTP API to an existing application by deriving a class from QObjectHandler. For example:

@code class Api : public QObject { Q_OBJECT public slots: void something(QHttpSocket *socket); };

QHttpHandler handler; Api api; handler.registerMethod("something", &api, &Api::something); @endcode

A client can send a GET request to /something and the appropriate slot will be invoked. The chatserver example provides a demonstration of this.