I am trying to wrap my head around Parse server and have the following questions.
Is this a hosted service on AWS? and what is the benefit of using this?
What is the relationship between Parse server and MongoDB?
On the parse server site the following is stated, The Parse hosted backend will be fully retired on January 28, 2017 does this mean this is obsolete and I should avoid using this?
How do I implement security (authentication and authorization) on this?
I'll try to be brief:
The open source Parse-Server is solution that you host yourself as if it was any other web application. You can host your own instance of Parse-Server on platforms like AWS, Heroku, etc. There are lots of benefits including being able to use many more adapters (other push notification services, file storage services, etc) as well as performance improvements (no artificial limits on req/sec). Several new features are being added to the open source version that are not supported in the Facebook hosted solution.
By default Parse-Server uses MongoDB as database store (default), just like a Rails Application would use PostgreSQL as a database store. Latest Parse-Server can also use PostgreSQL as a database store.
Parse-Server is not obsolete and far from it. The shutdown date refers to the hosted solution that Facebook provided.
Parse-Server provides these features out of the box, one of the many reasons it is very popular. For this I recommend reading the documentation: http://parseplatform.github.io/docs/.
Disclaimer:
I work on the Parse Server Ruby Client SDK that is compatible with the open source server.
Related
I'm new to web development and just built my first website with .Net Core. It's primarily HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with a little C# for a contact form.
Without recommending any service providers (question will be taken down), how do I go about deploying the website? The more details the better as I have no idea what I'm doing haha.
Edit: I am definitely going to go with a service provider, however the business I am building the website for doesn't have a large budget so I want to find the best provider at the lowest cost.
Daniel,
As you suspect, this is a bit of a loaded question as there are so many approaches. One approach is to use App Services within Microsoft Azure. You can create a free trial Azure account to start that includes a 200.00 credit, which is more than enough to do all of this for free. Then, using the Azure Management Portal, create an App Service (also free) on an App Service Plan in a region that makes sense for you (i.e. US West). Once you do that, you can download what is called a Publish Profile from within the App Service's Management Portal in Azure.
If you're using Visual Studio, for example, you can then right click your project and "Publish" it (deploy to the cloud, or the App Service you just created). One option in that process is to import an Azure Publish Profile, which you can do with the one you just downloaded. This makes it really simple. The Publish Profile is really just connection information to your Azure App Service (open it in Notepad to see). It will chug for a bit and then publish and load the app for you. You can also get to the hosted version of your app by clicking the Url of the app in the App Service management portal on the main page.
This may be oversimplifying what you need to do, but this is a valid direction to take. AWS and others have similar approaches.
Again, tons of ways to do this, but this is a free approach. :-) I don't consider Azure a Service Provider in the sense that you asked us not to. Instead, I wanted to outline one turn-key approach with specific details on how to get there.
You can find specific steps in a lot of places, such as this link:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/deploying-your-web-app-using-azure-app-service/
DanielG's answer is useful, but you mentioned you don't want use any services from service provider.
Usually, there are only three ways to deploy the program,
first one is the app service provided by the service provider mentioned by DanielG,
**Benefits of using service provider products:**
1. Very friendly to newbies, follow the documentation to deploy the application in a few minutes.
2. It offers a very stable, scalable service that monitors the health of our website.
3. We can get their technical support.
**Shortcoming**
It is a paid service, and although Azure's service has a free quota, it will run out.
**Suggestion**
It is recommended that websites that are officially launched use the services of service providers.
second one is to use fixed IP for access (it seems that fixed iPv4 IP is not provided in network operations),
**Benefits of using fixed IP:**
If there is a fixed IP address, or if the carrier supports iPv6, we can deploy our website, and the public network can access it. And if you have domain, it also can support https.
**Shortcoming**
1. There are cybersecurity risks and are vulnerable to attack.
2. Without perfect website health monitoring, all problems need to be checked by yourself, and it is very troublesome to achieve elastic expansion.
**Suggestion**
It is generally not recommended because there is no fixed IP under normal circumstances. Broadband operators used to offer it, but now it doesn't.
If you are interested, you can try ipv6 to test.
the last one is to use tools such as ngrok or frp for intranet penetration.
**Benefits of using intranet penetration:**
Free intranet penetration services such as ngrok, the URL generated by each run is not fixed, and there are some limitations, such as a new URL will be generated after a certain period of time, which is enough for testing.
Of course you can purchase the service of this tool, which provides fixed URLs and supports https.
**Shortcoming (same as the second one)**
**Suggestion**
The functional implementation is the same as the second suggestion, and the physical devices used by the website are all their own. The intranet penetration tool (ngrok, or frp) solves the problem of not having a fixed IP, providing a URL that you can access.
There are few users and the demand for web services is not high, so it is recommended that individual users or small business users use ngrok and frp in this scenario. Generally suitable for OA use in small businesses.
I am building a UWP app that targets both x86, x64 and ARM platforms. I want to replace the current implementation that uses Azure for the backed (an App Service and an SQL Server) because of the high price and because my Pay-As-You-Go subscription does not allow me to set a spending limit.
I thought about using a local database but I don't know if that could be a solution since I want the user to be able to have his data synced on both PC and phone for example. I am also ok with renouncing the idea of a structured database in favor of structured files (like xml) if I can find a way to keep them somewhere in the cloud (and then I can read/write them from the client app - no need for App Service).
Are there any free, non-trial alternatives to Azure? Or should I look more into the file storage implementation? Thanks in advance.
Instead of Azure you could use another web hosting solution to publish you API. Azure also offers small free plans that might be sufficient.
An alternative would be to request access and store/sync data to user's OneDrive. Each logged in user with Microsoft Account should have OneDrive storage available so this is a good middle-ground, which is still free for you. A nice introduction to this can be found in this article.
UWP also offers RoamingFolder where you can store small files that are synced across the devices that you use. Unfortunately this is less reliable because you are not able to control when the sync happens and cannot resolve conflicts.
I have successfully migrated to another cloud platform: Heroku. In my opinion, at least for small apps, Heroku offers the best solution both technology-wise and price-wise.
I am now able to have a webservice hosted for free in the cloud, without worring about traffic and number of requests. Of course you can scale up if you want better performance, but you can start with a free plan. Also, I have a postgressql db hosted also in the cloud, also for free (up until 10 000 records, and it will be just 9$/month if I want to upgrade to 10 milion). One can never found an offer like this free on Azure.
I had to learn a bit of Node.js (there are a lot of languages Heroku supports for backend services, but .Net is not one of them) but it was totally worth it!
Another option that is now starting to gain more and more popularity is FireBase. I will certantly also check that out for my future apps.
Background: I'm working on developing client functionality for OpenLDAP and ActiveDirectory in java. Have used Unboundid LDAP SDK for the same. This setup will be used for pulling data from different clients.
I've setup a Windows server with AD instance running on it. As a next step, I want to test my functionality against this AD server. However, setting up all of the "corporate level" data sounds like a big task given that I'm not terribly familiar with all of the possible configurations/group permissions setup. I did find this option which looked ideal for my scenario but the download won't complete. Please suggest what's the best way to generate "real looking" corporate data for testing AD server.
http://ldapwiki.willeke.com/wiki/LDIF%20Generator.
I followed this to setup the data.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2014/02/10/how-to-use-the-active-directory-performance-testing-tool-on-windows-server-2012.aspx
No issues faced on 2012 server.
Many applications use the following model:
Browsers or other clients interact with application servers.
Application servers (web servers or RPC servers) interact with data store servers (SQL servers or non-SQL storage).
For internet applications, they need application servers because they must keep simple feature on data servers for performance. But I can't see why they need application servers on intranet.
For example, can we develop an Adobe AIR application, which directly connect to a PostgreSQL server? I guess we can deploy a center PostgreSQL server which has many stored procedures and set strict permission, and let the Adobe AIR application fetch (and modify) data only by invoking the stored procedure.
Why don't the most of applications choose a simplier solution?
In general, there is no reason why you couldn't get an independent application to talk to a PostgreSQL server directly. Some applications do this and it works fine.
I'm not familiar enough with Adobe AIR to say whether it's possible in this context. In principle, if you can get a PostgreSQL driver, or if you can write your own using TCP sockets (the PostgreSQL network protocol is documented in details in the official documentation), you could certainly connect directly.
This being said, having a form of application server between the end-client and the database server isn't purely for performance.
Web-based development allows the SQL queries to be controlled by the server. Instead of exposing complete SQL access, you expose the features that the client can use. If you need to tweak the queries later (bug, change of data structure, ...), you can do this rather centrally on your application server, without having the need to deploy a new version of the client to each user.
Of course, you can do some abstraction like this user server programming directly, but this isn't suitable for all applications. This may depend on what other features your application needs, for example if it needs to make use of a library programmed in another language. You can use some procedural languages bindings, but it's not always suitable: pl/Python is an "untrusted" language (which may cause security problems) and pl/Java needs a external add-on, for example.
In addition, not all applications are ultimately reserved for intranet usage nowadays. It often makes sense not to restrict yourself to intranet usage when you start designing an application.
I initially started with a direct access design and quickly found it useful to move to an application server where I talked to the DB via web services. Reasons included:
Handling DB restart, local connection loss, client IP address change, etc is much easier when you're talking to the DB over a stateless protocol like HTTP. This is more of an issue for remote workers.
Transactions are clearly demarcated and isolated in server-side transactional methods (I used EJB3 and container managed transactions)
It's much easier to add new clients like a phone app as they can share more of the code and business logic. Stored procedures in the database are very useful, but can be limited and occasionally frustrating.
Some tools/languages don't have built-in tools for talking to PostgreSQL directly, but can easily talk to a RESTful web service with XML or JSON request/response format.
DB admin is easier if you're dealing only with a single application server connection pool
The main downside is of course the extra layer means extra work and extra maintenance.
You can, but...
Browser languages/libraries tend to have poor database support
What happens when someone wants to use this application remotely?
If you're not talking about browser-based applications, then that is exactly what many do. There are plenty of traditional installed client applications talking to a backend database either directly or via a wrapper (odbc/jdbc).
I have a question about whether cloud vendors have an inter-operable mechanism. For example, I am developing a WCF service and hosting in Azure successfully. After a pro-long time using Azure, can I use the same code for deploying it in AWS? Will it be possible? Does the API of both matches the same for deploying? If not, what are all the extra care needed for hosting the same service when switching over other Cloud Vendors like Salesforce.com, OpenStack, etc.,
In general, you can't just take what you develop for one Cloud platform and put it on another: they have different functionality sets and expose different APIs. However, the more low-level you make your code, the more likely it is that you'll find another vendor with a very similar API, since virtualizing infrastructure is simpler (and closer to standardized) than virtualizing a CMS application.
If you're using just IaaS, you can probably port fairly rapidly but you have to do more work to make your application. If you're using PaaS (or SaaS!) then you're more locked-in but you get more support for developing rapidly: it's that support platform which is both the value-add and the lock-in, and you won't get one without the other.
If you're using an Azure web role for hosting your WCF service then from deployment point of view you will not have many problems with AWS. You'll simply use facilities offered by AWS SDK for .NET (aka Publish to AWS CloudFormation). For sure you'll have to change the logging part if you've used Azure Diagnostic and alla Azure services with related AWS services. We did this multiple times in the last year and it works.
For worker role it's not so simple because in Azure they are easily deployed like web role, but in AWS you haven't direct deployment from Visual Studio so you have to do some manual work using Windows Services or something else