Introducing Qt network programming
Qt supports network programming and provides lots of high-level APIs to ease your work. QNetworkRequest
, QNetworkReply
, and QNetworkAccessManager
use common protocols to perform network operations. Qt also offers lower-level classes to represent low level network concepts.
In this chapter, we're going to utilize the high-level APIs that Qt has offered to write a downloader to retrieve the Internet files and save them to your disk. As I mentioned earlier, the application will need the QNetworkRequest
, QNetworkReply
, and QNetworkAccessManager
classes.
Firstly, all network requests are represented by the QNetworkRequest
class, which is a general container for information associated with a request, including the header and encryption. Currently, HTTP, FTP, and local file URLs are supported for uploading and downloading.
Once a request has been created, the QNetworkAccessManager
class is used to dispatch it and emits signals, reporting the progress. Then, it creates...