[boost] asio review

From: marcoh77_at_[hidden]
Date: 2005-12-30 11:28:47

- What is your evaluation of the design?

The design looks quite good. There are some points I don't realy like, e.g. that there are no high level classes. The use for _simple_ network workings is too complex. It seems as if the instance user needs too much knowledge to start with asio.

- What is your evaluation of the documentation?

For a first release in boost it's good. But for the future there should be some more informations for network beginners like me. The first five tutorials shows how complex the library is because the examples have nothing to do with networking. It's realy strange and discourage for a beginner to use asio if he want to start with it. Although the tutorials are understandable.

- What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?

The asio library is very usefull and mainly _necessary_ for the C++ community. boost is the right organisation to push a network lib and to improve asio. For the future it's important to make asio more interesting for network beginners and simple network working. I think asio is a realy good base.

- Did you try to use the library?  With what compiler?  Did you have any problems?

I tried asio with the tutorial examples. I used it with VC++7.1 and everyting worked well. It looks like there is a mistake in the asio introduction, that said that you need only the headers of boost. But with the asio tutorials with the timers you need to build the boost.date_time library. I don't know if it's only for the VC++ users, but I needed in the first example the date_time library and not only the headers. But this is not a technical mistake.

- How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study?

I have worked with the tutorial for one or to hours.

- Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

I'm a beginner in networking and used to this day only high level networking library like for webservice calls and like this.

Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library?  Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion.

Yes it should be accepted!

Best regards
Amin Kharchi

PS: Sorry for my bad english.

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