Welcome to Casablanca

Question

We are happy that you are interested in Casablanca. You are at exactly the right place to learn about how to use client side and server side code in C++.

Here’s what you get with Casablanca:

• Support for accessing REST services from native code on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview by providing asynchronous C++ bindings to HTTP, JSON, and URIs
• A Visual Studio extension SDK to help you write C++ HTTP client side code in your Windows 8 Metro style app
• Support for writing native-code REST for Azure, including Visual Studio integration
• Convenient libraries for accessing Azure blob and queue storage from native clients as a first class Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature
• A consistent and powerful model for composing asynchronous operations based on C++ 11 features
• A C++ implementation of the Erlang actor-based programming model
• A set of samples and documentation

We welcome you to use the forum to ask questions about how to use Casablanca, to make suggestions for how we can improve, and to report bugs and problems.

We are also releasing a survey to learn more about you and get feedback from you on how we could improve Casablanca. Please help us out by filling the survey link here: http://bit.ly/casablancacpp

Thanks,

The Casablanca Team

Answer 1

Appreciate this effort, this nicely fills a large C++ gap.  Right now I'm using Qt's HTTP C++ classes and they work quite well.  Hopefully this will bring Metro style C++ development up to a similar quality.  We're gonna need that https support though...  :-)

Answer 2

Michael,

I'm glad you like it. Yes, HTTPS is critical for many uses, particularly when your data is cloud-bound. For getting feedback on what the APIs should look like, it didn't seem as crucial, so we opted to release Casablanca a little earlier without it.

The other thing we didn't hold up the release for was Azure table support, which is arguably as critical and useful as blobs. For tables, we felt we needed to think a bit harder about how to make the formulation of queries feel natural in C++. Any ideas on that front will be highly valued.

Niklas

Answer 3

I too do appreciate the effort. It’s gonna change the way we do business around here. Kudos!

 

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Fernando A. Gómez F.
fermasmas.wordpress.com
Galería de ejemplos

Answer 4

I'd like to congratulate the team. I was looking for something like Casablanca, but as was said in the video, most C++/HTTP/REST projects out there are not based on modern C++ standards, and this makes the code a lot harder to write and maintain. Thanks for you effort!

Fernando Bastos

Brazil

Answer 5

Thanks everyone!

We would love to hear feedback on the domains and the kinds of applications that you are building. Conversations on this thread is great or you can give us some data by filling out this survey: http://bit.ly/casablancacpp

Vikas.

Answer 6

Michael,

I'm glad you like it. Yes, HTTPS is critical for many uses, particularly when your data is cloud-bound. For getting feedback on what the APIs should look like, it didn't seem as crucial, so we opted to release Casablanca a little earlier without it.

The other thing we didn't hold up the release for was Azure table support, which is arguably as critical and useful as blobs. For tables, we felt we needed to think a bit harder about how to make the formulation of queries feel natural in C++. Any ideas on that front will be highly valued.

Niklas

Are you looking towards LINQesque composition for query structure/composition Niklas?

Answer 7

I'm really sorry, I completely missed this question for a whole week.

Eventually, yes. Whether we do that out of the gate or not is still being debated.

Niklas

Answer 8

Hi I think this is a nice project, just saw a presentation about it at tech ed au.

we have a commercial application that currently communicates via CORBA and would be interested in replacing that with an HTTP layer.

This stacks up quite well against the fairly immature open source c++11 http libs out there and we would be more comfortable using a stack from ms than a fragmented bunch of components.

my #1 request would be for you to support XML output as a first class citizen and #2 make sure it is cross platform - we compile to linux and windows  

Answer 9

James,

Thanks for your comments!

Regarding #1, we will (eventually) support XML as a first-class citizen, but it has seemed like less of a priority for us with Casablanca, since there are actually a fair number of decent XML libraries already available. However, we will want to support asynchronous XML parsing at some point, and that means writing our own API on top of some existing parser, I think. As a reference, we currently rely on XmlLite for our parsing of Azure storage responses on Windows, and will be using libxml++ on Linux, I believe.

Regarding #2, we will have a Linux port of Casablanca. We're already working on it, in fact, but we are not ready to release it.

Niklas