Hi Caleb, --- Caleb Epstein <caleb.epstein@gmail.com> wrote: <snip>
One place where asio stops short, however, is in the area of more high-level user-friendly abstractions.
If asio does get accepted, and after wider in-the-field experience is gained, i'd like to look at developing a library of higher level abstractions, e.g. common protocols like http, functions for creating endpoints from URLs etc. I see one of the roles of asio as to provide a basis for further abstraction.
There is one example application (in example/iostreams/daytime_client, unfortunately not linked to in the Review Materials HTML documentation) that illustrates how a high-level Iostreams-based interface can be built using asio and Boost.Iostreams. The "socket_stream" class implemented here is pure gold for users who want to write simple client applications and don't want to know about the demuxer, host resolver, or asynchronous operations. It might be worthwhile to include this class or something like as part of the asio library and not just as an example.
I didn't really think it was of high enough quality as-is :) particularly with respect to its interface, but if people think otherwise...
I've run into some const correctness problems for operations that should likely be const (e.g. basic_*_socket::get_local_endpoint, and ::get_remote_endpoint). For example it would be nice to be able to write this:
Oops. I fixed it for stream_socket and datagram_socket, but not for socket_acceptor. Sorry!
std::ostream& operator<< (std::ostream& os, const asio::ipv4::tcp::endpoint& endpoint) { return os << endpoint.address().to_string() << ':' << endpoint.port(); }
BTW, operator<< is now defined for endpoints too, and it outputs in the format you use above.
The Reference documentation for the library is quite good overall, but it might make sense to elide some of the low-level detail in places. I don't think most users will care that stream_socket is simply a typedef of basic_stream_socket<> (though this could be mentioned on the basic_stream_socket<> documentation). The extra clicks required to get at the documentation you actually need (that of basic_stream_socket) can be frustrating.
Some time soon I'm going to look at using doxygen's XML output to generate the output in a friendlier format, and when I do this I'll automatically clone the documentation from basic_stream_socket<> to stream_socket, etc. I do like how doxygen keeps the documentation close to the code, but I find its generated HTML a little quirky. <snip>
It appears that the valid values for "asio::socket_base::message_flags" are undocumented. This makes the basic_stream::async_* functions rather hard to use :)
They are, but not linked to from anywhere it seems. You can find them on the socket_base page. I should add links to them from the functions that let you use them. <snip> Cheers, Chris