OpenTop Version 1.5
OpenTop version 1.5 is the latest release of ElCel Technology's
cross platform C++ development library. This version contains
a number of important improvements both to the range of functions
performed as well as the ease with which it can be integrated into existing
C++ projects.
8-Bit Character Strings
The most significant change in OpenTop 1.5 is support for
8-bit character strings. Since its first appearance, OpenTop
has supported the entire Unicode character range, but to achieve this
in the narrow "char" configuration, it encodes all Unicode
strings into UTF-8.
UTF-8 is an ingenious encoding, but the fact that
it encodes a single character into a sequence of one or more bytes
can sometimes complicate the way in which applications deal
with character strings. This additional complexity is justified
for applications destined for an international market,
but a significant number of applications are intended solely for
a domestic market where an extended ASCII-based Latin character set is
sufficient.
OpenTop 1.5 adds ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) to its list of supported internal
character encoding schemes. In this configuration, all character
Strings passed to and from the library use 8-bit Latin1 characters,
allowing the seamless and simple integration with both application code
and other legacy libraries.
HTML Form Emulation
In OpenTop 1,4 we delivered a completely re-designed
HTTP client stack. Now we've gone a stage further
by giving you classes to simplify the submission of web forms
from your C++ code.
It is common for Web services to be made available via the
submission of HTML forms. Examples include search engines,
currency converters, online stores and a myriad of other applications.
The form emulation classes in OpenTop 1.5 provide a simple yet flexible
way for applications to construct an entity representing the fields
contained within an HTML form. When the desired fields
have been specified, the entity is generated and submitted to a Web server
via a HTTP POST or GET request.
The HTML 4.0 Recommendation
defines two encoding methods which can be used for transporting form data:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data.
OpenTop 1.5 provides implementations for both of these encodings via the
URLEncodedFormEmulator and MultipartFormEmulator classes. The latter can even
be used to upload data files to a Web server application.
Other Enhancements
- We've created a SequenceInputStream class for for combining two or more
InputStreams into one contiguous stream of bytes.
- We've improved the command line parser and added a new MultiListOption
command line option handler.
- Encoding and decoding Strings is made easier by the creation of new
methods on the CodeConverter class. And the character encoding used
by the Console I/O streams is now easily controlled via static methods
on the Console class.
- Several of the new features in this release are demonstrated in a new sample
application called webform - which is a command line program
for submitting HTML forms and capturing the results.
Availability
OpenTop 1.5 is available for download right now!
Online ordering, secure purchasing and immediate download are available from
our online purchasing pages..
OpenTop 1.5 is a commercial product developed by ElCel Technology.
