Socket++ Source Code and Manual

This is Socket++ version 1.10. The code was oringially developed by Gnanasekaran (Sekar) Swaminathan (gs4t@virginia.edu), at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Virginia, a few years ago. The Socket++ code was periodically updated, but I haven't checked for new code in a while. The master repository was ftp://ftp.virginia.edu/pub.

Version 1.10 does not include C++ exception handling, and it therefore "more portable". I have compiled the libsocket++.a library on Solaris 2.5/2.6 using both the GNU and SunPro compilers, AIX using the GNU and IBM xlC compiler, and both Debian and RedHat Linux using the GNU and Cygnus egcs compilers, respectively. I also have compiled versions for Windows NT, and Windows 95 with Winsock2.

Version 1.11 has a number of changes that make it less portable. I recommend that you use version 1.10 unless you want to try out using exception handling, then you can try using version 1.11. If you use version 1.11, then you will need to catch exceptions in your mail client.

NOTE: I have fixed a bug in version 1.10 that was causing output to a socket not to be flushed, thereby causing the client to hang. I have also made some changes so that the code will compile and run on Windows using Winsock2. Someday, somebody needs to go through and make the code properly use the ANSI C++ libraries, especially the I/O streams.

If you do not want to bother with building from source code, I have precompiled libsocket++.a libraries and packaged them up with header files for Solaris, AIX, Linux, and Windows NT.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You must pick the library that was compiled with the compiler that you are using. You can not use a GNU C++ compiler library with either the AIX or the Solaris C++ compilers.

Prebuilt Sockets++ For Solaris 2.5/2.6

Choose the package that corresponds to the compiler you are using:

Note: When compiling your client, just use -I<incpath> to get the header files (e.g., smtp.h) and -L<libpath> -lsocket++ to link to the library. The incpath and libpath could just be your project directory. You will also need to link with two Solaris system libraries: libnsl.a and libsocket.a. These are both in a standard place, so you should simply define LDFLAGS in your makefile as:

LDFLAGS= -L<libpath> -lsocket++ -lsocket -lnsl

Where <libpath> is the path where you have put libsocket++.a

IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure that in your makefile that $(LDFLAGS) follows all the .o files when you link, otherwise you will end up with unresolved references at link time.

Prebuilt Sockets++ for AIX 4.1

Choose the package that corresponds to the compiler you are using:

The C sockets implementation on AIX is in the standard C library, so you should only need to use the -L<lib-path> -lsocket++ flags to the linker.

Prebuilt Sockets++ for Linux (Debian 1.3 and RedHat 5.1)

Choose the package that corresponds to the Linux system and compiler you are using:

You should not need to set LDFLAGS to anything special. If you have any problems, try setting 'LDFLAGS = -static', to force static linking.

Sockets++ for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95

I have made an initial port of the core (sockstream and sockinet) Socket++ 1.10 classes to Windows NT 4.0 using Winsock and the Visual C++ 5.0 compiler. This port includes the SMTP client code. I believe this port will work on Windows 95 as well. Please let me know of any problems. I have tested my own SMTP client program using this port over a dialup PPP link from a Windows NT 4.0 machine to a Linux mail server running qmail. The code is available as a zip file and contains both a VC++ 5.0 Developer Studio project file. The package includes a sample main.cpp file that contains code to initialize the Winsock DLL by calling WSAStartup and making sure that WSACleanup is called on exit. You can just copy this code verbatim. YOU MUST INITIALIZE THE WINSOCK DLL THIS WAY. If you do not, then your program will not work.

VC++ 4.x may not be able to read the VC++ 5.0 project file. If not, then you can just create a new static library project in VC++ 4.x and add the .h and .cpp files to that project and build. You will need to set the include path in the "options" settings so that the .h files are picked up from your project directory.

IMPORTANT WINDOWS NOTE: I recommend that you compile the Windows version as a debuggable multithreaded static library that can be used with DLLs (i.e., use the /MDd flag to VC++ and define _MT as a preprocessor flag) then just link it with your SMTP client program.

Also note that you need to modify your project linker settings to include wsock32.lib in order to link with the Winsock2 library. You should list the SocketsPP.lib before the wsock32.lib in your linker specification