neilmendoza / ofxAsio

A library for straightforward asynchronous networking in C++, designed for openframeworks users. Implemented as a wrapper for ASIO without Boost.

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ofxAsio

A wrapper to simplify using the Asio library for asynchronous networking in openFrameworks. I created this addon because I was frustrated with the limitations of ofxUdpManager and wanted something a bit more robust. In addition, I wanted to create something that was cross-platform and even framework agnostic. You'll find that this addon doesn't use any openFrameworks-specific classes, and can be dropped into any C++ project with minimal tweaking.

Requirements

Windows

To use this add-on, use the projector generator. The one trick is that you'll then manually have to remove the libs folder from the project, so that your compiler doesn't try to compile the headers. Once you've created a project, use the ofxAsio.props property sheet in config/ to set up your compiler properly.

This library has been tested with Visual Studio 2015 and openFrameworks v0.9.1

OSX

This project is currently not configured for Xcode in OSX. If anyone wants to take this on, I'd be glad to help. Otherwise you'll have to wait until I have a reason to need it on my Mac :)

Usage

ofxAsio is a a relatively minimal wrapper around the Asio library to try to make networking easier. There are two main classes, one for sending UDP messages (UdpSender) and one for receiving UDP messages (UdpReceiver).

Both should be created as such:

 std::shared_ptr<ofxAsio::UdpSender> mUdpSender = std::make_shared<ofxAsio::UdpSender>();
 std::shared_ptr<ofxAsio::UdpReceiver> mUdpReceiver = std::make_shared<ofxAsio::UdpReceiver>("0.0.0.0", 8080);

For both classes, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the Datagram class. A datagram is the combination of a udp message and an endpoint; in ofxAsio we've encapsulated the endpoint as an Endpoint class that contains an IP address and a port number. The message itself lives in the Datagram class, represented as a std::vector.

The Datagram class is meant to be versatile to meet most possible needs, which means that it should be able to accept strings as the message, but it should also be able to accept data packets (which would typically be buffers of unsigned char, or bytes). As such, Datagram has several ways to set the message:

void setData(char* data, std::size_t length);
void setData(std::string message);
void setData(std::vector<unsigned char> data);

All three accepted data types (char*, std::vector<unsigned char>, and std::string) are also accepted in the constructor.

In addition, just like a normal std::vector, you can push_back() into the Datagram, as well as get an iterator with begin() and end().

Both UdpSender and UdpReceiver send and receive asynchronously, so the preferred way to deal with the results is to use callbacks. With both classes you can attach a function callback that accepts a std::shared_ptr<Datagram> via the functions addOnReceiveFn() and addOnSendFn(). If you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out the examples.

Examples

  • example-udpSender shows how to send messages repeatedly.
  • example-udpReceiver shows how to asynchronously wait for and print messages.
  • example-tcpClient shows an asynchronous sending of Tcp messages.
  • example-tcpServer shows asynchronous receipt of messages with callbacks.

Contributing

This project uses the Git Flow paradigm. Before contributing, please make your own feature branch with your changes.

More Information

About

A library for straightforward asynchronous networking in C++, designed for openframeworks users. Implemented as a wrapper for ASIO without Boost.

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