Edward Diener wrote:
It is very nice that ASIO has all of this functionality which you mention but since the overview documentation, aside from the tutorials and examples, is nonexistent it would take a more persistent programmer than I am to figure out how to do anything with the library other than socket programming. Even in the latter regard I find the lack of an overview to be daunting as I do not learn libraries well from tutorials/examples, but do from actual documentation with conceptual explanations.
I agree. Last week I had to create a prototype for a real-time multiplayer game including multiple clients and a server. I've been meaning to look at Asio for a while so I used it for this project. I started by reading the using Boost.Asio, tutorial and design sections. After I finished this I really still had almost no idea how to use the library to accomplish my task. I then looked to the examples and found that that chat program was probably the closest thing to what I needed. I found the code for it to be somewhat convoluted and includes no comments at all. I finally found some information I could digest in the reference section. For my demo server io_service run worked fine but I didn't want to deal with the complexities of multithreaded code for the client in my timefram. I eventually found io_server poll which suited my clients needs but I don't recall seeing this outside of the reference. I came to some incorrect conclusions based on the reference material that didn't show up until they were runtime errors. For instance while doing an async_read I passed in a buffer created from the asio::buffer function by passing a std::vector. The reference documentation says: "An individual buffer may be created from a builtin array, std::vector or boost::array of POD elements. This helps prevent buffer overruns by automatically determining the size of the buffer: " I took this to mean that if I passed in a std::vector it would resize the vector to the size required to complete the read. I found out that I was wrong rather abruptly when I got a crash after passing in an empty std::vector. On the whole I probably learned more from the comment blocks above the Asio functions than the documentation. Eventually I did manage to cobble together something that appears to function which is all I needed for my current task and it was easier than using winsock directly which I haven't done in several years. I really want to learn how to write better and more efficient networking with Asio but the documentation seems to be a reference for people that already know networking well. For instance the design section says: "To allow the development of efficient network applications, Boost.Asio includes support for scatter-gather operations" But not why or how these make network applications more efficient. Thanks, Michael Marcin