Introduction to ATL Server

ATL Server, newly introduced in ATL 7.0, is a set of ATL extension classes designed for server-side programming. Despite the ATL in the name , these classes have little to do with COM and have been primarily designed to let C++ developers create three kinds of server-side applications:

• ISAPI extensions

• XML Web Services

• Web applications

To help you build these applications, a large number of classes are provided as part of the ATL Server library, including classes for

• Working with sockets and HTTP

• Handling cookie-based sessions

• Caching session state in memory or to database tables

• Performance monitoring

• Working with SMTP

• Writing SOAP clients and servers

• Handling MIME types, and encoding or decoding using various schemes, such as Base64

• Formatting HTML

• Working with files, including memory-mapped files, and providing IStream -like access to files

Discussing all of these in detail would require a book in itself. Therefore, in the sections that follow, Ill introduce you to the architecture of ATL Server, and I will use two of the main application typesWeb applications and XML Web Servicesto demonstrate the main features of the ATL Server library.