IMPORTANT: You do not have to build this library before using it. It is a header-only library. Many modern C++ libraries are developed this way and it makes them much easier to reuse - something we really want to encourage.
The Microsoft Windows API, aka Win32, is large and written in a way that suits C programmers but doesn't really fit with the modern C++ way of working. Washer aims to wrap parts of it to be easier to use for any programmer familiar with the C++ standard library (aka the STL).
Not even close! So far we have only wrapped a tiny part of the Windows API, mostly the parts we needed for our own projects, but we encourage you to use this library where you can and submit patches back to use when you have had to wrap part of it yourself. We hope that, this way, we can begin to build up a substantial library to make Windows development in C++ much more fun than it sometimes is.
Inevitably, in a world where we are trying to encourage code reuse, Washer depends on some third-party libraries.
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Boost is fast becoming essential to any modern C++ development and Washer uses it heavily. Any recent version should do although building the test suite requires version 1.40 or above as previous versions lack Boost.Test.
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Comet is a very clever, portable C++ library for Microsoft COM development. COM is used for parts of the Windows API so we use Comet to wrap those bits.
Just download the dependencies, add washer/include to your
compiler's include path and you are ready to go. The library is
documented inline and you can use Doxygen to generate documentation
for it if you want.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with the OpenSSL project's OpenSSL library (or a modified version of that library), containing parts covered by the terms of the OpenSSL or SSLeay licenses, the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work.
The OpenSSL library is incompatible with the GPL license because it contains an advertising clause. However lots of useful, open source software (including our own projects) need to use it and currently the alternatives aren't quite up to scratch. As we want these projects to be able to reuse Washer, we have added this exception to the GPL - a common technique used by other projects such as wget.
If GnuTLS improves to the point where OpenSSL is no longer necessary, we may remove this exception.