appbricks

1. Intoduction

Appbrick project contains a number of c++ classes and functions usefull for application development especially when using a pre c++14/17 compliant compiler.

2. Overview

In the current versions following components, further called bricks, are implemented:

• optional - class handy for passing values which could be nullable
• stringview - which allows to perform read-only operations on sections of a larger string without copying the data
• blob - class which lets you store different types of data (similar to boost::any)
• text - a wrapper for std::string with a number of text transformation methods
• textutils - set of text tranfromations implemented as free functions (these are used by the text wrapper)

Most of the above are header only implementations which makes using them in your own project painless. For convenience cmake configuration is prepared. It lets you generate and compile the code with the toolchain of your choice.

3. Building

After downloading the project to generate build configuration simply call:

cmake -G <generator_name> [-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<destination_dir>]

To build and install the files to a specified directory run:

cmake --build . --target install

All of the created implementations are correlated with a set of unit tests. This project utilizes googletest library as a unit test framework. Still, you don't have to download and build gtest separately - it is incorporated as one of the build flow steps.

Unit tests for the appbricks can be build and run by calling:

cmake --build . --target tests ctest

4. Documentation

At this stage of the project there is no wiki page available. Hence, the best way to see how a particular brick can be used is to analyse unit tests related to it. Each brick has its own set of tests prepared in a distinct file.

So for example, if you're interested in blob class then check out test_blob source file for usage details.

5. Contribution

To make the development easier (at least for the UT part) there is an additional and optional -DDEV_MODE=ON parameter which can be specified at the cmake configuration stage.

This switch makes the unit tests work with the headers from repo dir structure. When not specified, unit tetst are build against the files in the installation directory.