Question : Server Side Application

Hi experts,

I need some advice or links to assist. I have developed a desktop app that simply parses some scripts to build instances of classes and then serialises the data into an xml file. This is currently a win32 console application in Visual Studio and was developed as part of a proof of concept to show that we could parse the files produce an output file in an xml format.

In the end solution - we want the application to run server side and to be activated by commands past to it by a wXWidgets front end that is client based. We want the app to run cross platform.

1) How will moving the application to run server side effect the code within it? Most of the coding has been done in native C++ and there is no use of windows forms - although there is some use of windows.h.I am pretty sure that the app wont run server side because it is not sat in a windows operating environment. Could someone outline the things i would need to consider to be able to run the application from a front end GUI?

We want to design this in such a way that the front end could be designed by anyone as they please - therefore the parsing application thats running server side is completely independant of the gui.

Just some comments/links/guidance to a novice developer please

Answer : Server Side Application

The easiest approach will be using CGI.

You can use http://www.gnu.org/software/cgicc for C++.

The good thing about CGI is that you can leave a lot of the functionality to the web server: authentication, encryption, ...

XML might be used for the communication directly in a challenge-response manner.

You might have hard time converting the application from MSVC to GCC. I would recommend that you first try to get rid of the windows.h header, and then start slowly testing your application under GCC. Don't use the GCC builds for Windows (GCC 3.x). Linux provides many supreme debug tools like valgrind or GDB, so don't forget to use them, they really pay up.