C++ – The C++ web stack, is there one

First I think is best talk about what is MVC Architecture and then go further into the way you are currently programming.

The MVC Architecture is way to organize the workflow inside a sotfware sistem, think about it as a layered way to implement system behaviour. This layers are:

1. Model: Represents your Data Model, its the system core where all information related to it should be localized. So for example: if you are going to desing a Game you'll need Players, Rules, Obstacles, and some logic related to the interactions of this elements such as : Players should be able to sort Obstacles when some set of Rules apply.

   The Model is the first think you should think off because its going to be the center of your applications.

2. Controller: This is where the magic happens and where the Layered Architecture meets the Object Oriented Paradigm it was intended to use. Here is where you implement how does the system reacts when some application user request something about the app vai the user interface.

   The Controller should be able to handle the Model Objects, do operations with them to achieve what the user requested and then delegate the result to the corresponding View Layer to render it back to our user.

3. View: This is the Start and End Point of User interactions. Here is where you define how users interact with the application. Nowadays is quite common users try to access, for example, web applications from different kinds of media such as: Mobile Phones, Tables, Pcs, Laptops, etc.

   Generally each techonologie needs a diferent language to create the view, so imagine that your Data Model and the way that model interacts and how you render that interactions is all hardcoded, there is absolutely no way to reuse your code in a way that is not CopyPaste. The result is code that smells and lots of time wasted adapting the HOLE sysmte.

   The virtude of having the View in a separated layer, allow us to work independently from the Model we are currently working on. We only need to know how we should render the list of objects the controller is sendng us. How did he generated it is completly trivial

So , finally we got an independet Model that could be adapted as we see fit according to our current needs (today i need to handle a Monouser Game with no rules, tomorrow i whan to play with friends and now its Multiuser, and so on) that not depends on how are we going to render it to the user. Then, a Controller that captures users request that came from a view , process Model Objects, and then gives the information back to the View to render it.

Back to the first question you asked: Like you can see (i hope) MVC is a WAY to do things and not a TECHNOLOGIE to create software. You could use your java Servlets, and implement a MVC Achitecture under it.

Here is a Q&A example site using a MVC Architecture to clarify a little

Any web software will only send and receive messages through sockets, that's all. You could use any language to do this, it's not specific to languages.

However, you'd better not reinvent the wheel for this kind of work so most languages that are used to do web applications have their set of framework that does the basic communication for you, to allow you to concentrate on the specificities of your project. Ruby have ROR, Python have Django and others, Java as ...etc.

C++ historically didn't have any similar framework until recently:

• a modern-C++ way of doing it is to use something like CPPCMS;
• there is also an effort to setup a standard library for web dev. in C++, one of them being cpp-netlib;
• Recently there have been a release of a cross-platform REST API library for C++11 from Microsoft called Casablanca which also helps;

Now, the "ridiculous amount of C++" that Google is built over is necessary because you need to have very-high-performance modules to solve the kind of problems Google solves. Good luck trying to do the same without any module written in a language focused on performance. I recommend reading the CPPCMS wiki about this subject to understand better. For historic facts, Amazon, Google, Facebook (see Hip Hop and recent Alexandrescu interviews) and some other really big web services do have cores in C++, for obvious computational reasons that are more important than the time lost on programmer productivity.

CPPCMS and cpp-netlib being open source, you can study them if you want to know how to make an application work as a web service using C++. That said, any application that can listen to ports and send data to port can potentially do this, it's all about protocoles (TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.), not code.