NCBI C++ Toolkit provides free, portable, public domain libraries with no restrictions use. It works on Unix, MS Windows, and Mac OS platforms:

· Networking and Interprocess Communication (IPC) library with IOSTREAM adaptors
· MultiThreading Library
· CGI and Fast-CGI Library
· HTML Generation Library
· SQL Database Access Library
· C++ wrapper library for BerkeleyDB
· C++ IOSTREAM Adaptor/Wrapper Library
· GZIP and BZ2 C++ Wrapper Library with IOSTREAM adaptors
· ASN.1 and XML Serialization Library with C++ Code Generator Tool (datatool)
· Date and Time Library
· File System Function Library
· Command-Line Argument, Configuration and Environment Processing Library
· Sequence Alignment Algorithms Library
· BLAST Engine Library
· Biological Sequences Retrieval and Processing Library
· Portable FLTK and OpenGL based GUI and graphic libraries

Besides the above, there are a whole lot more useful libraries, both general purpose and biotech-related that are constantly developed, maintained and used in real-life production by hundreds of Web and standalone applications and their programmers (also counted in hundreds).

If you are a C++ developer you will find the portable nature of the libraries very useful in building cross-platform applications even if you do not have much interest in Bioinformatics. Libraries such as the ones for the CGI/Fast-CGI, HTML, Networking, SQL Database Access, ASN.1 and XML Serialization are quite general purpose and can be used in a variety of applications outside the Bioinformatics problem domain.

The C++ Toolkit undergoes active development with the libraries being built every night. The source code is freely available through FTP and CVS. The documentation for the C++ Toolkit is available online in the NCBI Bookshelf format and also as downloadable book in Acrobat's PDF format.