I am in a development team which have just about finished developing a system for a client which involves a MVC4 Web, a WCF service platform and a Windows Store App which communicates with the web that the service.
We are running Continuous Integration practices for the Web & Service solutions which include automated deployment to dev, test, acctest and production environments. Building, testing, configuring and deploying to production is one click and five minutes away.
The one huge pitfall that we've had in this project was the fact that we chose to develop the app as a Windows Store App without investigating deployment possibilities which do not involve publishing the application to Windows Store. This is a process called sideloading, and i will not go deep into the technical requirements which Microsoft impends to enable this.
Our client will be using the application on 20~ Surface Pro tablets, and we are investigating into an automated release/deploy process for the application. As of this moment, we are using OneDrive to manage build artifacts and let the customer IT admin download the artifact from there to manually install the app on all clients. In the future, however, it is very possible that the organization who ordered the system will deploy this worldwide and there will be a requirement to deploy the application to hundreds, if not thousands of clients.
We spent entire weeks investigating whether Windows Intune can be a good platform for automated deployment of the application. If an organization installs the Intune platform, it's clients get the Company Portal which is like a private Store, where we could upload the app and updates to it in the future. There was, however, one big minus with the Company Portal - it has NO update management for Store Apps. That is, releasing a new version of our application to the Company Portal does not work like releasing a patch or update of your app to the Windows Store - there's no notification that there is a new version, and the application does not update itself. It's basically a new application that needs to be downloaded and installed after the previous version has been uninstalled.
Has anyone developed Windows Store Line-Of-Business applications which you had to sideload to multiple clients, and if so - which solution did you choose for update/patch management?
I am experiencing the exact same problem. Intune is indeed limited and too complex for many scenarios at the same time. Another option to "deploy" LOB Windows Store apps is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj657971.aspx. This covers the well known powershell deployment which is not very practical.
However, I have found an early stage, unofficial POC project on codeplex which I am currently investigating. You might want to take look at this: https://bootybay.codeplex.com/
Related
Our application does the following operations. When a user registers on a portal, the application does the following
Installs certificates to Local Machine store. Installation of the certificates is done by a Windows Communication Service (WCF)
Creates a VPN profile (using Windows.Networking.Vpn APIs)
We need to ship this app to end user which consists of an UWP App, and a Windows Communication Service. We would like the user to install this app with as few clicks as possible and the result should be that user should have UWP app installed as well as the WCF Service installed and running on his/her system. We are looking for guidance relating to the best option to distribute this app to end-users? We are open to distributing this app through Windows store or by sideloading.
Please provide your guidance after taking into consideration all the below scenarios
Update/Upgrade of UWP-Application or WCF-Service.
Uninstall scenario.
How can we distribute this application for Windows 7. (Note: We use XAML Islands to make UWP App running inside WPF)
Thank you
Sujay
We're planning to develop a web based Healthcare Practice Management System. Due to HIPAA we're requested to deploy the app in our own premises. Our company is relatively small currently we have only software engineers and no devops engineers but still we want to develop the application to support horizontal scaling(adding more servers).
Planned to use:
Python3 (Django)
PostgreSQL
I'm looking for something like AppScale but with the freedom of choosing our own runtime, database and frameworks.
In other words from the software engineer's perspective:
Should provide an easy way to deploy django application
Should have web based dashboard to monitor and control(like AppScale)
Should make load balancing simple (app and database)
AppScale implements the Google App Engine APIs which, IMHO, make it super easy to develop web apps quickly and efficiently.
On top of that, you get auto-scaling, load balancing, and the ability to deploy on-premises and plug in any third-party library you need.
AppScale already comes with a dashboard and will soon be launching a new management service for your AppScale deployment(s).
If you're not particularly hung up on Python3 and PostgreSQL, all of the above seem to cover your requirements.
It's worth noting that opting for the GAE model means you opt for NoSQL and, so, postgres is probably not the best option.
Disclaimer: I'm part of the AppScale team and we're already helping companies develop and deliver their apps in the HIPAA compliance realm.
I chose Kubernetes which is a container orchestration technology specifically designed for Docker and also found that scaling is not just the responsibility of platform that the app is deployed on but also its depends on how the app is designed and coded. For that The Twelve-Factor App methodology is really helpful.
But I can't deploy database on Kubernetes because its not recommended by Kelsey Hightower(author of Kubernetes Up and Running) in his talk. So, for now I chose to deploy my database on a VM.
Can we build commercial apps using the IBM Worklight free Developer Edition?
I searched the IBM official site and I sensed that we have to buy the license to develop commercial apps. But, can someone please clarify it?
Legally speaking: No, you cannot.
Non-Production Limitation
The Program can only be deployed as part of the Licensee's internal
development and test environment for internal non-production
activities, including but not limited to testing, performance tuning,
fault diagnosis, internal benchmarking, staging, quality assurance
activity and/or developing internally used additions or extensions to
the Program using published application programming interfaces.
Licensee is not authorized to use any part of the Program for any
other purposes without acquiring the appropriate production
entitlements.
Technically speaking: you could create an application that does not utilize Worklight features that in order to use them in a production environment, you'd have to buy the Consumer or Enterprise Edition of IBM Worklight.
By doing so you will lose:
The ability to install Worklight Server on an application server
The ability to utilize Worklight Adapters for backend connectivity, that rely on Worklight Server
The ability to secure your application using numerous built-in security features (application authenticity, device provisioning, ...)
The ability to manage your applications (notify, disable, ...)
The ability to remotely update (Direct Update) your applications
The ability to leverage Worklight's unified Push Notifications
The ability to see operational analytics
... and the list goes on.
Instead, you will have to rely on AJAX requests and spend time on (re-)implementing various aspects required for an application (but that's also of course depending on the scope and purpose of the application).
Also see:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17030963/ibm-worklight-license-is-worklight-free-to-use/17031953#17031953
IBM Worklight - Limitations of Worklight Studio for Developers
For any inquiries about Worklight I would suggest to contact IBM:
https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/signup.do?source=raq&S_TACT=109HE02W&lang=en_US
I am testing one Desktop based client server application. I want to perform a Security test of that application.
Can anybody explain me which points i can consider while performing Security Test of the Desktop application?
Testing of desktop application is easier than web application as there are less users than web applications.
Followings are two important point that you need to keep in mind during security testing of desktop application
• Test user’s rights and roles-authorized person should allow to login
• Test security of data or information stored in application.
Security testing on Desktop application is not that much easy task, in market we can't find the proper free tools like web application tools
for java based desktop application use JavaSnoop tool and proxy tool
for .Net based desktop application use echo-mirage and proxy tools
the test cases are quite simple
1. System testing: verification of registries, files and logs
2. Static testing: de-compile the files and do code-review, Gendarme tool is perfect
- do memory dump analysis
3. Dynamic testing: verify the communication
i hope this will help you
I'm in the process of providing a Web UI as an alternative to our current desktop UI for our C/S enterprise application.
When developing the client-side in our desktop version, UI developers could connect to any server so they only needed the client-side environment.
When developing a Web UI (Client-side JavaScript in the browser), we are bound by the browser's "Same origin policy" so the UI must talk to the same server from which the UI code is downloaded.
As far as I see it till now, the development scenario for the UI guys is:
Developer installs server on local
machine and runs it.
Developer edits the HTML+JS+CSS files on local installation.
Developer has to reinstall/update server on local machine each time there's a need to test UI code against new server behaviour.
This does not seem too comfortable, at least compared to our previous C/S style development.
Are there any other ways you can suggest to that will not require UI developers from installing and updating server side components on their development machine ?
Or anything else related that can simplify the development process ?
Thanks :-)
Editing in some clarifications:
I'm mostly interested in the aspects of UI coding, not UI design.
I need a lot of server interaction - getting data from RESTful web services, which are developed in parrallel - hence the need to have an up-to-date server
You haven't specified the development platform.
As far as pure HTML/JS/CSS is concerned, you don't need a server. The UI developer can fine tune UI components locally.
The moment you want to talk/integrate to Server (via AJAX, JSP, ASP...) then you need to connect a development server as now your changes have to be served by Server.
Most of UI fine tuning can also be done from Firebug
In our office when changes to styling are required we save the page as a local copy and send it to the UI designer, he makes his changes and we integrate them. So the UI designer don't have to maintain a development environment.
JSONP lets you work around the same-origin problem (with server support) -- check it out! If the front-end-in-the-browser developers are using a good framework suc as jQuery or (my favorite) Dojo, JSONP should be no harder for them than plain JSON.
Develop on a shared server, but depending on the size of the team.. that's challeging with respect to version control.
Or deploy automatically generated virtual machines with nightly builds, so the devs don't have to install, but always use a recent version.
In the case of UI developers depending on a common REST server, the UI development can be done on the local machine and the REST service should be on a central server. When changes are made to the REST service these should be deployed to the central server (when stable), so all developers can use the newest version (this also helps with testdata).
You could try using a proxy on the developer's machine where some paths redirect to the server and some paths redirect to local folders.
Hmm, I actually didn't really get any information on what kind of technology you're using. If - with UI Developers - you mean designers, which have to take care about the CSS, layout etc, then we do it the same as lud0h said. We (developers) send the UI designers a copy of the server-side produced HTML pages. They then edit the HTML pages according to accessibility guidelines, CSS and layout and send us back the outcome of their work. We use their HTML pages then for integrating them in our web applications.
If you don't just mean tuning CSS, but also to write JavaScript / Ajax functionality you HAVE to use a server with which you're communicating. As you said, normally this is done by having a local environment which is similar to the server-one. In .Net Visual Studio '08 provides an internal webserver, alternatively you have to install IIS locally. In Java environments you have to install Tomcat and related technologies. In my eyes this is a must. What you have to have is
Versioning system (CVS, SVN,...) where developers commit regularly (minutes/hours)
local environments where developers checkout the source from the repository and develop
Test server where you deploy on a daily basis (could be like daily builds) in order to test your running product
I guess this should be what a professional development environment should consist of. The difference to C/S application development is that web UI and web-client code are not that separable as a Client UI in C/S environment from the server-side. Unless you develop with technologies like GWT or Silverlight which are quite similar to C/S, just running inside the browser, but communicating over RPC calls or web services.
//Edit:
What I nearly forgot. Don't do something like developing on the server directly, meaning that all of the developers access the server's filesystem where the code, UI etc. lies!!
You can use CORS. a new technique just like Ajax, but with ability to make calls on other domains. so you will need only one UI on one server. think this can help you.