Re: [boost] Documentation for Boost libraries

From: Boris (boriss_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-30 08:16:05

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.

Boris

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