Re: [boost] Documentation for Boost libraries

From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-30 09:23:36

Boris wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:50:10 +0200, Edward Diener 
> <eldiener_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
>> [...]From the tutorials I would guess that the library, consisting of 
>> some 120+ individual items as specified in the reference, has to do 
>> with using network sockets, in synchronous and asynchronous mode, and 
>> nothing else. Perhaps this is true but that is an awful lot of items 
>> just for dealing with socket programming in ASIO. Even here a good 
>> general introduction to socket programming with ASIO would have been 
>> welcome. Of course something tells me that there is more to the 
>> library than just network socket programming, but I do not have the 
>> patience to dig into this by looking at some 120 individual items to 
>> see what each one
> 
> Yes, the name Boost.Asio is misleading for those who look for a network 
> library. If you don't happen to read the description of Boost.Asio at 
> http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0 you miss the library. But then the 
> description itself is misleading as it gives developers the impression 
> Boost.Asio is a network library which should have been really called 
> Boost.Net: "Portable networking, including sockets, timers, hostname 
> resolution and socket iostreams."
> 
> While today nearly all I/O objects in Boost.Asio deal with network 
> functions you can extend Boost.Asio with new I/O objects which don't do 
> networking. But it turned out that this isn't even known in the Asio 
> mailing list. Boost.Asio is really a library to support *any* 
> asynchronous I/O functions which include network functions which again 
> happen to be the only ones supported by Boost.Asio out of the box. If 
> you have a look at http://www.highscore.de/boost/file_monitor.zip though 
> you get an idea how you can create a new I/O object which notifies you 
> asynchronously when a file is changed.

It is very nice that ASIO has all of this functionality which you 
mention but since the overview documentation, aside from the tutorials 
and examples, is nonexistent it would take a more persistent programmer 
than I am to figure out how to do anything with the library other than 
socket programming. Even in the latter regard I find the lack of an 
overview to be daunting as I do not learn libraries well from 
tutorials/examples, but do from actual documentation with conceptual 
explanations.