Wt: an introduction
Wt (pronounced as witty) is a C++ library for developing
web applications.
The API is widget-centric and uses well-tested patterns of
desktop GUI development tailored to the web. To the developer, it
offers abstraction of web-specific implementation details, including
client-server protocols, event handling, graphics support, graceful
degradation (or progressive enhancement), and URL handling.
Unlike many page-based frameworks, Wt was designed for creating
stateful applications that are at the same time highly interactive
(leveraging techinques such as WebSockets and Ajax to their fullest)
and accessible (supporting plain HTML browsers), using automatic
graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. Things that
are natural and simple with Wt would require an impractical amount of
effort otherwise: switching widgets using animations, while being
perfectly indexed by search robots with clean URLs, or having a
persistent chat widget open throughout, that even works in legacy
browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
The library comes with an application server that acts as a
stand-alone Http(s)/WebSocket server or integrates through FastCGI
with other web servers.