/** \mainpage SENF: The Simple and Extensible Network Framework The SENF Simple and Extensible Network Framework aims to be a complete set of libraries to facilitate the development of network applications focusing on network protocols on the layers below the application layer. However, the framework includes many general purpose utilities and will be expedient to use well beyond its primary objective. \section Goals The main goals of this library are (in no particular order): \li modular framework design \li utilizing the power of modern C++ \li very low overhead for frequently called members \li extensible design \li concise interface \section start Getting started To get started using this library, begin by checking out the code from the BerliOS SVN repository. You may find help on using the library at '\ref usage'. If you are interested in SENF, feel free to subscribe to the SENF mailing lists. \see \ref usage\n \ref example\n The BerliOS project page\n The SENF Wiki at BerliOS */ /** \page usage Using the SENF framework The SENF Framework is a collection of lossly coupled modules. The libraries are heavily object oriented and template based. For compatibility reasons, the libraries are therefore built together with every project making use of the framework. When starting a new Projekt based on the SENF framework, it is advisable, to make use of the SENFSCons build environment and use SVN to manage the code repository. This is the configuration, described in this documentation. \see \ref build \n \ref components \n \ref svnsetup \section Preliminaries Before starting the devlopment, make sure to fulfill the following requirements: \li GNU g++, version at least 3.4 \li The Boost libraries (http://www.boost.org) \li The SCons build tool (http://www.scons.org) If you want to build the documentation, you additionally need \li Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org) \li The \c dia diagram editor (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/) The library is only tested with gcc-3.4 and 4.0 on Linux. On other POSIX platforms with a BSD Socket API, the library should be usable, possibly with some tweaking (except for the Scheduler, which relies on \c epoll) \todo \li Preliminaries: SVN access, Dependencies \li Building the library -> Configuration \li Setting up a project using this library (svn:externals) \li Library components \li coding standards and patterns */ /** \page build Building the framework This procedure will test building the complete framework including the unit tests and the Sniffer test application. This build is \e not needed to use the framework since every project will include the full SENF source code itself (via Subversion). After you have successfully built the library tests, you can continue to setup your own project using SENF. \see \ref components \n \ref svnsetup \section checkout Getting the code To access the code, check out the code from the BerliOS repository. Change to your development directory and use the following subversion command 
      $ svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/senf/trunk senf
This will create a new directory \c senf within the current directory. For further documentation on the use of Subversion, see the \c svn manpage or the subversion homepage at http://subversion.tigris.org. A very good introduction and reference to subversion is available at http://svnbook.red-bean.com. \section compile Building To build the library, execute all unit tests and build the Sniffer test application, use 
      $ scons
      $ scons all_tests
in the \c senf directory. This assumes, that you want to build the library with your default gcc and requires the boost libraries to be available in the system include paths. If this is not the case, you can take a look at SConfig.template file. Copy this file to SConfig and comment out all the variables you don't want to change (The \e values in the template file are just arbitrary examples). */ /** \page components The SENF modules The framework is made up of several modular components. When using the library, it is possible to selectively choose to use only a subset of the implemented modules. \see \ref build \n \ref svnsetup \section libSocket libSocket: C++ abstraction of the BSD socket API This library provides a high performance and object oriented abstraction of the standard socket API. It utilizes a flexible and extensible policy based design. The library provides predefined types for the important socket types (UDP and TCP sockets etc) including raw and packet sockets. \n \see libSocket API reference \section libPackets libPackets: Network packet manipulation This libarary provides a very flexible infrastructure to parse, create and otherwise manipulate packetized network data. Included is a library of several protocol parsers covering the basic IPv4 and IPv6 network protocols down to the Ethernet layer. \see libPackets API reference \section libScheduler libScheduler: Asynchronous event handling The scheduler library provides an object oriented interface to the standard UNIX \c select type event dispatcher. It is based on the high performance \c epoll system call. It provides support for read/write events as well as simple timer based events. \see libScheduler API reference \section libUtils libUtils: Collection of arbitrary utilities This library is used be most all of the other modules for miscellaneous tools and utilities. We have \li Simple functions to manage daemon processes \li Standard exception classes \li satcom::lib::intrusive_refcount to simplify the implementation of classes usable with boost::intrusive_ptr \li boost::bind extensions \li An interface to the \c g++ demangler integrated with type_info \li Typedefs and rudimentary methods to simplify handling high-resolution time values \see libUtils API reference \section senfscons SENFSCons, the SENF build environment SENF relies on SCons (http://www.scons.org) to build. To further simplify the common tasks, SENF includes a library of custom routines and builders comprising a very concise build environment. Included are a number of templates to help bootstrapping a new project or component. \see SENFSCons reference */ /** \page svnsetup Setting up a new project using SENF via SVN The preferred way to use SENF in a new project is to rely on Subversion and make use of the SENFSCons build environment. The following sections will describe, how this setup works. \section svnext Setting up the project repository The most seamless integration is possible if you rely on Subversion to manage the new project. Subversion does support 'external repositories'. This allows to import code from a foreign repository into the checkout without importing it into your repository. The code will always stay at the remote repository, updates are automatically available. First setup a new empty repository as described for example in the Subversion book at http://svnbook.red-bean.com or as mandated by your site policy. We will call the project 'Foo' and assume, that the project has been checked out into the 'Foo' directory. You now have to decide, which modules you want to use. Every module resides in it's own subdirectory in the SENF repository. Instead of directly checking out the code, we will use \c svn:externals. This will instruct \c svn to auutomatically check out the needed directories from the BerliOS SENF repository. Change to the 'Foo' directory and type 
        $ svn propedit svn:externals .
The default editor (probably VI) will be started with the current value of the svn:externals property (which will probably be empty). Now add all the modules you want plus \c satscons and possibly \c doclib (if you want to build the documentation). You will almost certainly neeed the \c Utils module, since all other modules depend on it. For example, if you want to use the \c Scheduler and \c Socket module, the file will look like 
        satscons http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/senf/trunk/satscons
        Utils http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/senf/trunk/Utils
        Scheduler http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/senf/trunk/Scheduler
        Socket http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/senf/trunk/Socket
exit the editor and the property will be set. Now run 
        $ svn update
and the code will be checked out into the corresponding directories. \todo \li Configuring and building -> reference to the SENFSCons dok */ /** \page example Sniffer: A simple Example application */ \section code Coding practices The library heavily depends on the features of modern C++. As such, it depends on a fairly recent and standards compliant C++ compiler (the Library is developed using \c gcc with Version at least 3.4). To meet the above defined goals, the library makes quite heavy use of advanced templating techniques, so understanding the implementation will require expertise in the intricacies of C++ templates. However, it was deemed important to keep the \e visible Interface of the Library as clean and simple as possible without sacrificing the projects design goals. The library heavily depends on the \e Boost libraries (see http://www.boost.org). The Boost libraries are an ever growing collection of highest quality reusable C++ components. They are designed with standardization in mind. Many of the libraries are already in queue to be part of the next generation C++ standard. // Local Variables: // mode: c++ // End: