Introduction

STLplus is a collection of reusable C++ components for developers already familiar with the STL. It contains abstract data types to extend the STL, reusable components, data persistence and portability components. The collection is general-purpose and portable between Windows and Unix platforms.

The abstract data types expand on the STL as the name STLplus suggests. The data types provided are:

directed graph
hash table
2-dimensional matrix
N-ary tree
smart pointers

The generic subsystems are components to build up applications in a modular way. They provide commonly-used functionality. The subsystems provided are:

command-line parser
configuration-file manager
error handler
library manager

The portability subsystems provide platform-independent interfaces to platform-specific features. This is so that programs can be written to be inherently portable by using this library to access those features. The target platforms for portability are Windows NT/2k and all flavours of Unix, including Linux and Solaris on PCs, plus Solaris, HP-UX and AIX on workstations. The components provided are:

file system access routines
object-oriented subprocess handling
platform-independent Text I/O
object-orientated TCP networking

The library includes a solution to the problem of data persistence for C++ data structures. The data persistence components allow any well-structured data structure to be dumped and restored. The same techniques can be used to transmit data structures over network connections. The persistence format is platform-independent and so can be used to transfer data structures between platforms.