Tofu is a framework for building web applications in C with as minimal effort as possible, allowing simple web applications to be created rapidly and with few lines of C code.
Tofu is web server agnostic, which means that applications written using the Tofu API can be run on a wide variety of backend web servers with very little work on the app developer side.
Attention: Tofu is highly experimental software, take it as a proof-of-concept.
Put the following code into hi.c
:
#include <tofu.h>
tofu_rep_t *hello(tofu_req_t *req, void *argp) {
tofu_rep_t *rep = tofu_rep_init();
tofu_head(rep, "Content-Type", "text/html");
tofu_write(rep, "Hello World!");
return rep;
}
int main() {
char *opts[] = { "0.0.0.0", "8080" };
tofu_ctx_t *ctx = tofu_ctx_init(TOFU_EVHTTP, opts);
tofu_handle_with(ctx, GET, "/hi", hello, 0x0);
tofu_loop(ctx);
return 0;
}
compile and run with:
$ cc -o hi hi.c -ltofu
$ ./hi
then visit https://0.0.0.0:8080/hi with your browser.
For more info have a look at the full documentation.
Tofu does not provide any advanced functionalities that may be useful when developing web applications. Here's a list of useful external libraries to extend your Tofu applications (or any other software written in C/C++):
- houdini is a simple API for escaping and unescaping text for the web.
- amaca is a tiny template engine which natively supports Lua scripting.
- ctpl is another template library written in C.
- jansson is a C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON data.
- discount is an implementation of John Gruber's Markdown markup language.
- hiredis is a minimalistic C client library for the Redis database.
- libmongo-client is an alternative C driver for MongoDB.
If you know any other library, please let me know.
libcurl
(only for the tests)libfcgi
(only for the fcgi backend)libevent
(>= 2.0) (only for the evhttp backend)jansson
(only for the zmq backend)zeromq
(only for the zmq backend)
Tofu is distributed as source code. Build with:
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install
Note that, by default, all the backends are built.
To build the documentation:
$ make html
Copyright (C) 2011 Alessandro Ghedini [email protected]
See COPYING for the license.