Foxy

Low-level HTTP session primitives for Beast/Asio + URL parsing and pct-coding

Examples and Reference

Requirements

• C++14 and above
• CMake 3.13+
• Boost 1.71+
• OpenSSL
• Catch2 (for testing)

vcpkg is recommended for easy dependency management.

Supported Compilers

GCC 7+, Clang 6+, MSVC 2019

Why Foxy?

• You're a Beast user who wants a reliable HTTP session vocabulary type
• You want a client session abstraction that automatically handles DNS, TLS and certificate verification
• You want a server session abstraction that can detect TLS handshakes and perform them
• You need a URL parser
• You need percent encoding and decoding
• You need a TLS forward proxy
• You want a convenient HTTP(S) server abstraction that handles connection setup + teardown

Description

Foxy is a C++14 library that aims to make idiomatic usage of Boost.Beast and Boost.Asio easier.

Foxy offers users low-level HTTP session primitives. These come in 3 forms: session, client_session and server_session.

The session class is direction-agnostic while the client_session and server_session offer additional functionality that implementors of clients and servers may find useful.

The utility of the session abstractions is that they abstract away the typical boilerplate required for using Boost.Beast. Sessions encapsulate sockets, buffers and timers which are all used during stream operations. They also reduce the API surface and enable implementors to focus solely on using Beast's message class and Asio's executor model.

Foxy also touts a best-in-class URL parser along with a set of URI parsing combinators adopted from RFC 3996. In addition, there are routines for percent encoding and dedoding URL components.

Foxy is built on top of Boost.Beast and Boost.Asio along with Boost.Spirit's library, X3. Foxy does not treat these libraries as implementation details but exposes them directly. To this end, Foxy is as powerful as plain Beast/Asio are and anything one can do in Beast, one can do using Foxy.

Foxy aims to be competitive with the HTTP libraries offered by both Node.js and Go.

While these languages are significantly higher-level than C++ is, their standard HTTP libraries are low-level from an abstract perspective. The success of these languages and their libraries has shown that the modern web development is favoring an ever-lower set of HTTP APIs.