How to integrate Boost.Asio main loop in GUI framework like Qt4 or GTK

Question

Is there any way to integrate Boost.Asio with Qt4 (preferred) or GTK main loop? GTK provides poll(2) like API so technically is should be possible. Qt provides its own networking layer, however I prefer to use existing code written for Boost.Asio. I want to integrate them without using an additional thread.

Is there any reference how to do this for Qt4 (preferred) or GTKmm?

Thanks.

Edit

I want to clearify several things to make the answer easier. Both Qt and GTKmm provide "select like" functionality:

• http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtcore/qsocketnotifier.html
• http://www.gtkmm.org/docs/glibmm-2.4/docs/reference/html/group__MainLoop.html

So, the question is, how to integrate existing "selectors/pollers" as reactor to Boost.Asio io_service. Today, Boost.Asio can use select, kqueue, epoll, /dev/poll and iocp as reactor/proactor service. I want to integrate it to the main-loop of GUI framework.

Any suggestions and solutions (better) are welcome.

Answer 1

It's rather old question but for those who are reading it now I would like to share my code which is an implementation of QAbstractEventDispatcher for boost::asio.

All you need is to add the following line before creating QApplication (usually it's in main()).

QApplication::setEventDispatcher(new QAsioEventDispatcher(my_io_service));

It will cause, that io_service is being run together with qt application in one thread without additional latency and performance drop (like in solution with calling io_service::poll() "from time to time").

Unfortunately, my solution is for posix systems only, since it use asio::posix::stream_descriptor . Windows support may need completely different approach or quite similar - I don't really know.