How to Create Restful Web Services using c++ language and JSON Parser

Restbed can address your requirements with the exception of a JSON parser. However, combining a solution with one of the many C++ JSON implementations already available requires very little work.

#include <memory>
#include <string>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <sstream>
#include <jsonbox.h>
#include <restbed>

using namespace std;
using namespace restbed;

void get_method_handler( const shared_ptr< Session > session )
{
    const auto request = session->get_request( );

    size_t content_length = request->get_header( "Content-Length", 0 );

    session->fetch( content_length, [ ]( const shared_ptr< Session >& session, const Bytes& body )
    {
        JsonBox::Value json;
        json.loadFromString( string( body.begin( ), body.end( ) ) );

        //perform awesome solutions logic...

        stringstream stream;
        json.writeToStream( stream );
        string response_body = stream.str( );

        session->close( OK, response_body, { { "Content-Length", ::to_string( response_body.length( ) }, { "Content-Type": "application/json" } } );
    } );
}

int main( const int, const char** )
{
    auto resource = make_shared< Resource >( );
    resource->set_path( "/resource" );
    resource->set_method_handler( "GET", get_method_handler );

    auto settings = make_shared< Settings >( );
    settings->set_port( 1984 );
    settings->set_default_header( "Connection", "close" );

    Service service;
    service.publish( resource );
    service.start( settings );

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Alternative RESTful frameworks

• Casablanca C++ REST SDK (edit: project moved & renamed)
• CPP-Netlib
• RESTful Mapper
• Simple REST (edit: no longer exist)
• Google is your friend.

Alternative JSON frameworks

• LibJSON
• RapidJSON
• JSONMe
• JSON++
• JSON-CPP
• Google is your friend.

I know this is late, but something new has come up a year or two ago.

If you're into hardcore asynchronous programming for high-performance, you can consider boost::beast. It's a layer above boost::asio (the generic tcp/udp and i/o library) that has both http(s) and websocket servers/clients.

Keep in mind that these are ideal for performance and full freedom in multithreading (you can literally run your server on thousands of threads with almost perfect caching if you have a server that can take it), but they have a steep learning-curve. Do this only if you need to have absolute control over everything!

I'm using oatpp in combination with nlohmann JSON. Though you may get away with purely oatpp as it has built-in JSON handling features. Please, see a step by step guide.

If you are building a RESTful service client, you should consider a library such as Casablanca (which is maintained by Microsoft and is a cross-platform solution for accessing RESTful APIs) https://github.com/Microsoft/cpprestsdk.

Otherwise you could also use libcurl https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl

There are C++ bindings for curl. Depending on your board, libcurl might already be installed. All you have to do would be to use the C++ bindings.

Both libraries handle http/https. libcurl does not provide a json parser but you could easily combine it with any C++ json parser available. Casablanca is complete and built on an asynchronous model. It relies however on the Boost libraries. Nevertheless I have used on an Intel Edison board with success.

For send/receive data in JSON format, try jsoncpp

Use an embedded web server, such as Mongoose, CivetWeb or NXWeb. (see this post for more details)

Generally these are trivial to embed in your application, then you only need a JSON library to parse/create JSON data in the web server route handlers. REST is, after all, only HTTP requests so this is easy to implement using one of the above.

The minimal web service capable of using SHTML would include Open SSL..

Here is an example of a simple C++ SHTML Server using TCP/IP calls no framework other than OpenSSL

• simple C++ SHTML Web Service Server using openssl
• simple C++ SHTML Web Service Client using openssl

Here is a pretty comprehensive list of Restful Frameworks by language like 300 of them..

• List of Restful Web Service Frameworks

As of writing this answer searching that more comprehensive list for "C++" yields more than 60 entries.

Probably your best bet is to use FastCGI to create a module to interface with your web server. This should prevent you from having to implement your own HTTP server.

There are some frameworks like CppCMS that embed their own HTTP server, so you might not need something as heavy as Apache httpd.

I'm assuming your REST service will not be under heavy load.

Also, CppCMS supports JSON out of the box, see http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/cppcms_1x_json.