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The Ionflux Tools Class Library (iftools)

0.2.3

Introduction

Thank you for your interest in the Ionflux Tools Class Library project!

The Ionflux Tools Class Library is a lightweight multi-platform C++ framework designed for rapid development of applications in a client/server architecture. It features a set of useful classes and tools, such as a powerful template engine and a universal hierarchical type. The Ionflux Tools Class Library is released under the GNU General Public License, meaning it is free software! (See LICENSE in the distribution for more information.)

Features

Features of the Ionflux Tools Class Library include:

• Generic, serializable tree data structure.
• Template Engine, including Class templates.
• Memory management (object pools, reference counting, parent objects).
• Logging/console output facility.
• Command line parsing.
• Configuration file I/O.
• Database interface.
• IO multiplexing.
• Perl-compatible regular expression pattern matching.
• String Filters.
• Advanced date and time handling (not restricted to the POSIX epoch, supporting time zone conversions).
• Generic byte string tokenizer.
• TCP socket API.
• Generic TCP client and server, message based client and server, and authenticated client and server.
• Support for the Cairo vector graphics API (http://www.cairographics.org/).
• Miscellaneous helpful and easy to use utility functions.

Furthermore, the following tools are provided with the distribution:

• ifdate A world clock and datetime conversion utility.
• iftpl An easy-to-use template processor.
• ifpasswd An SHA-1 based authentication file generator.
• ifls A template-enabled directory listing utility.

Download

See the SourceForge.net page of the project for releases available for download:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iftools/

You can always get the latest version of the Ionflux Tools Class Library from the Subversion repository at:

https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/iftools/

To get the Ionflux Tools Class Library from Subversion, you need to have Subversion installed (http://subversion.tigris.org/). Then change to a directory of your choice (for example iftools) and type:

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/iftools/trunk/

This, however, is a development version, and might possibly be unstable. You should not use this unless you want to help with debugging and testing new features.

Documentation

Documentation is available from the official Ionflux Tools Class Library Homepage:

http://www.ionflux.org/tools/

If you have already downloaded and unpacked the Ionflux Tools Class Library, or have obtained the distribution from Subversion, you can generate the documentation from source using Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org/). Just type

doxygen

in the root directory of the distribution.

Dependencies and contributed code

Ionflux Tools uses the following libraries:

• PCRE (Perl compatible regular expressions).
• bzip2
• mysql
• Gtkmm (optional)

Ionflux Tools also uses the following external code:

• Mersenne Twister randomizer class by Richard J. Wagner (rjwagner@writeme.com, http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~wagnerr/MersenneTwister.html); based on code by Makoto Matsumoto, Takuji Nishimura, and Shawn Cokus (matumoto@math.keio.ac.jp, Cokus@math.washington.edu, http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/eindex.html).
• FIPS-180-1 compliant SHA-1 implementation by Christophe Devine (http://www.cr0.net:8040/code/crypto/sha1/).

Please refer to the extern directory of the distribution for detailed information and license.

Please see README in the distribution for more information and INSTALL for installation instructions.

If you find any bugs or want to send a feature request or comments and suggestions, please feel free to send a mail to mail@ionflux.org.

Tools

This is an overview of the applications included with the distribution.

ifdate

ifdate is a world clock and datetime utility. It displays the current time or various timestamp variants in a specified time zone and output format.

ifdate supports all the time zones of the world, but does not know about all the cities and DST rules of the world (yet). To obtain a list of recognized time zone alias names (which you may use with the -l option of ifdate), run ifdate with the -a or --aliases option.

More time zone aliases (city names) and DST rules will be added in the future. (If you really miss a certain alias name or DST rule, or if you detect a wrong time, please let me know and I will try to fix the problem as soon as possible.)

(See also The ifdate tool)

iftpl

iftpl is a template processor that uses the Ionflux Tools template engine (Ionflux::Tools::Template). See test/template/test.tpl and test/conf/template.conf for an example of how to write templates and configuration files. iftpl has been used to generate some of the classes of Ionflux Tools. You can also take a look at the templates in the template directory of the distribution.

For more information, see the Template Engine documentation.

ifpasswd

ifpasswd is a tool to generate password files for the simple authentication implemented in Ionflux::Tools::AuthFile. Actually, a line generated by ifpasswd consists of an username, a separator (':') and the SHA-1 hash of the password, encoded as a hexadecimal string. You can use ifpasswd to generate authentication files for Ionflux::Tools::TCPAuthServer.

ifls

ifls is a directory listing utility (similar to ls). The output can be customized using templates.

You can also check the test directory for more tools, such as a generic TCP client and server and an echo server.

Have fun!

Copyright © 2003-2006 Joern P. Meier (mail@ionflux.org).

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