Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Web Development

Wt: A Web Toolkit


Wt is a freely available library and application server (www.webtoolkit.eu/wt) that lets C++ programmers write modern web applications using a familiar C++ GUI programming style. Wt then renders the C++ applications to the web browser. Figure 1, for instance, is a running Wt application—a functional look-alike of the GMail composer, fully AJAX enabled, and written entirely in C++ using CSS for the markup.

From a programmer's perspective, the Wt API is similar to those offered by libraries such as Qt, Gtk, wxWindows, and the like. However, instead of rendering widgets to Windows/X11/ windows, Wt incrementally renders the widgets in web browsers. Wt completely hides the underlying web technologies (HTML, AJAX, XML, CGI, JavaScript, and DHTML), chooses a rendering and session-management strategy depending on browser capabilities, and deals with browser dialects.

Browser-side events such as button clicks, mouse movements, and drag-and-drop events are transparently converted into server-side events using Wt's signal/slot mechanism. Wt comes with a dynamic C++-to-JavaScript translation mechanism to avoid the high-latency server roundtrip for simple visual updates, while sticking to a single C++ specification of the event-handling code. While Wt's rendering engine preferably uses AJAX for incremental rendering of updates made to the widget tree, Wt applications also work when AJAX or JavaScript are not available (or disabled). By exposing only a widget-level API, the library can guarantee protection against the most common cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, by built-in and automatic filtering of displayed strings for malicious tags.

Figure 1: A running Wt application.

Being a native C++ library, web applications developed with Wt typically enjoy greater efficiency and a smaller footprint than Java or Ruby solutions. As such, Wt lends itself to devices where efficiency and footprint matters, like in embedded applications.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.