NCBI C++ Toolkit

Online documentation for C++ Toolkit:

• C++ Toolkit book

NCBI C++ Toolkit provides free, portable, public domain libraries with no restrictions use - on Unix, MS Windows, and Mac OS platforms:

• Networking and Interprocess Communication (IPC) library with IOSTREAM adaptors
• MultiThreading Library
• CGI and Fast-CGI Library
• HTML Generation Library
• SQL Database Access Library
• C++ wrapper library for BerkeleyDB
• C++ IOSTREAM Adaptor/Wrapper Library
• GZIP and BZ2 C++ Wrapper Library with IOSTREAM adaptors
• ASN.1 and XML Serialization Library with C++ Code Generator Tool (datatool)
• Date and Time Library
• File System Function Library
• Command-Line Argument, Configuration and Environment Processing Library
• Sequence Alignment Algorithms Library
• BLAST Engine Library
• Biological Sequences Retrieval and Processing Library
• Portable FLTK and OpenGL based GUI and graphic libraries
• XmlWrapp (XML parsing and handling, XSLT, XPath)

Besides the above, there are a whole lot more useful libraries, both general purpose and biotech-related that are constantly developed, maintained and used in real-life production by hundreds of Web and standalone applications and their programmers (also counted in hundreds).

If you are a C++ developer you will find the portable nature of the libraries very useful in building cross-platform applications even if you do not have much interest in Bioinformatics. Libraries such as the ones for the CGI/Fast-CGI, HTML, Networking, SQL Database Access,  ASN.1 and XML Serialization are quite general purpose and can be used in a variety of applications outside the Bioinformatics problem domain.

The C++ Toolkit undergoes active development with the libraries being built every night. The documentation for the C++ Toolkit is available online in the NCBI Bookshelf format and also as downloadable book in Acrobat's PDF format.

Getting The Source Code

For a current list of the source code archives for different operating system/compiler combinations consult the current Release Notes .

For FTP retrieval consult the indicated link.

Installing

Since the C++ Toolkit supports a variety of platforms and compilers, the process of building the libraries involves determining the platform and compiler specific features as well as third-party packages.

This is facilitated by running a platform-independent shell script configure on Unix or boot-strapping solution CONFIGURE on C++ Visual Studio. Additional details on the installation procedure can be found at the indicated link.

Typically, new public versions of the C++ Toolkit are released four times a year. The Release Notes are also updated when a new public version of the C++ Toolkit becomes available.

The C++ Toolkit documentation is available online through NCBI's  Book Viewer and also as a book in PDF format.

The online documentation is updated weekly with the latest version available every Thursday. The PDF version is currently lagging behind but will be synchronized with the online version in the future.

• Announces: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/cpp-announce (read-only)
• Everybody: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/cpp
• Core developers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/cpp-core
• Object Manager: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/cpp-objmgr
• GUI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/cpp-gui
• CVS logs: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/cpp-cvs (read-only)
• SVN logs: http://mailman.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/svn-admin (read-only)