We're attempting to write a Magento module integrating with a new payment method and checkout process.
This will be very similar to the Paypal Express Checkout process. We've found that Paypal Express Checkout is part of core - it's not a module.
My question is what is the best approach to this?
Should we extend app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/Block/Cart.php and overload getMethods,
or should we use observers to catch that we're on the page index.php/checkout/cart/, fetch the block and add our required elements to it?
What would be the proper approach to writing this kind of module?
Overriding any framework libraries is never a good thing (unless you've ran into a bug an need a quick patch). From a maintainability perspective this is a nightmare, and you will not be able to share your code that easily.
That said, you might be better off writing your own custom payment method. The internet provides many tutorial among this one: http://www.excellencemagentoblog.com/magento-create-custom-payment-method Moreover, Magento is very modular in nature and has it's own marketplace (if you feel the need for others to use your payment method).
PS. When building your payment method there is no need to work with Magento observers or overwrite any implementations (only the abstract handles), it all happens within the workflow of the checkout.
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What is the most elegant way to get a riot based UI today?
i'd love the following points to be addressed:
A proper code-mapping for easy debugging
A good way to bundle the application (so far i used Webpack and JSPM)
It would be lovely if it would work elegantly with Typescript.
Is it best to use Tag files, or straight JS? If the later, would it be better to use a class that inherit from riot's tag class? If so, can i place the template code in a different file?
Future compatibility: i saw that there's going to be a change (that "export default" thing) - how would you recommend to write the code for the smoothest migration path?
If you have more items for consideration - please add them....
Thanks for asking these questions. I have tried to answer to all your questions hoping they could be useful also to other Riot.js users
A proper code-mapping for easy debugging
the riot compiler generates simply javascript code without modifying too much the structure of your original source code. Any modern browser should be able to provide with debugger breakpoints and console calls all the debugging tools you need. Check for example the stack trace of this error you don't need much more to figure out where it's coming from.
A good way to bundle the application (so far i used Webpack and JSPM)
In this repo we provide 3 different javascript bundle examples: rollup, webpack, riot-compiler. I personally prefer rollup but you can (and should) use whatever works best for you and your team.
It would be lovely if it would work elegantly with Typescript.
The riot public methods are already available as Typescript interfaces:
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/#types/riot
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/#types/riot-route
I am not a typescript user and that's why I will not invest time in making examples in a technology I don't use but PR are welcome
Is it best to use Tag files, or straight JS? If the later, would it be better to use a class that inherit from riot's tag class? If so, can i place the template code in a different file?
I recommend you to just use Tag files because riot was designed as component library and it embraces completely the philosophy of components composition vs class inheritance. If you have code you share across several components you can either use mixins or import it with your bundler directly in your tags see for example
Future compatibility: i saw that there's going to be a change (that "export default" thing) - how would you recommend to write the code for the smoothest migration path?
Riot 3 will be not compatible with Riot 4. (that will be a full rewrite) I can't recommend any best practice to make your code portable to Riot 4. Remember that Riot 3 will be still supported and your code will run even on IE9 for the next 10 years. Once riot 4 will be released and the API will be stable I can provide more hints about a migration path.
I've started playing around with Appcelerator Hyperloop. While it seems great to access native APIs from JS from day zero, it does raise a few questions about architecture of the platform and the performance.
Currently (AFAIK) a Titanium app has a main UI thread (that runs the native UI controllers) and a JS thread (that runs the JS logic). Each call from JS to Native is passed though the "Bridge" (which is the expansive operation in an app).
Also, Titanium API doesn't cover all the native API and abstracts as much as it can. But if new APIs are introduced it could take time for Appcelerator to implement those into the platform.
One of my favorite things about Titanium is the ability to extend it (using objective-c for iOS and java for Android) - allowing to use native APIs that are not covered by Titanium, and also developing a really native performance controls in case we need to do anything that's too "heavy" for JS. And, as mentioned it's developed 100% native for each platform.
Now that Appcelerator introduced Hyperloop I've done a simple test app and saw that Hyperloop is not translated into native code but just to normal JS code:
var UILabel = require('hyperloop/uikit/uilabel');
var label = new UILabel();
label.text = "HELLO WORLD!";
$.index.add(label);
And another thing about it is that you have to run on the main thread.
So we basically have a few things come to mind here as far as Hyperloop architecture goes:
We still have a bridge? if Hyperloop is JS that calls "special" Hyperloop require then we still have a bridge, that now not only acts as a bridge but also needs to do some sort of reflection (which is also an expansive operation)?
Until now JS ran in it's own thread - so now running in a single main thread seems to be a potential source to more UI blocking operation.
The old-fashioned modules were truly native (not including the bridge call) - so how do Hyperloop-enabled apps compare with those?
There isn't much documentation or articles about Hyperloop that explain the inner working yet - so if anyone has any answers have been trying apps with it could be very helpful.
Answering your questions straight-forward:
There are no Kroll-Proxies involved anymore, since actual classes are being generated on runtime. This is done by using the hyperloop-metabase that does reflection (as you already said) to build an AST that grabs the actual signatures, types, classes, methods, properties, etc.
We did not see any performance-issues with running on the main-thread for now. If you do so, please file a JIRA-ticket so we can investigate the use-case.
The old-modules were "less native" then now, simply because they were all wrapped by the Kroll-proxy (by extending every view from TiUIView and every proxy from TiProxy / TiViewProxy. Hyperloop does not work with those, making the module-development much more faster by also allowing the developer to test his/her process live in their app without the need of packaging and referencing the module manually. Hyperloop modules are nothing else then CommonJS modules that are already used frequently across Alloy and other Ti-components.
I hope that gives you a quick overview on how Hyperloop works. If you have further questions, let us know!
Hans
(As a detailed answer to the above comment)
So let's say you have a tableview in iOS. The native class is UITableView and the Titanium-API is Ti.UI.TableView / Ti.UI.ListView.
While the ListView already provides a huge performance-boost compared to the TableView by abstracting the Child-API usage to templates, those child-API's (Ti.UI.Label, Ti.UI.ImageView, ...) are still custom classes that are wrapped and provide custom logic (!) e.g. keeping track of it's parent-references, internal data-structures and locks to jump between the threads.
If you now check the Hyperloop example of a native UITableView, you access the native API's directly, so no proxy behind it needs to manage sections, templates, items etc. Of course we deliver that API through a kroll proxy in order to display it in Titanium, but you don't "jump between the bridge" with every call you make from the SDK.
The easiest way to see that is to actually run some bigger example like the tableview, collectionview and view-animation. If you do a fast scroll through these, you already feel the performance boost compared to "classic" Titanium API's, simply because the only communication between your proxy and (like a Ti.UI.Window you want to add it to) is the .add() to receive the native API of the type HyperloopClass.
Finally, of course it still makes sense to use Ti.UI.ListView for example, because it comes with the builtin utilities that Titanium devs love (events, easy configuration and layout-handling). But thats also where the benefit of Hyperloop comes along, by allowing the developer to access those API's him-/herself.
I hope that helps a bit more to understand it.
Should I use workflow in my module development? I feel like it complicates things and make the development itself prone to errors. Does the benefit really outweigh the hassle I need to go through to implement workflow? Instead of just using actions and buttons?
As long as I know, workflows are going to disappear in following versions of Odoo, instead of them there are going to be only buttons calling methods which will modify the status of the object.
I have just modified a workflow in a custom module. This module was made to work only in version 8, and I have overwritten the workflow. If I wanted the module to be moved to version 9 and more, may be I would have used only buttons and methods as you have written.
I guess you can do it in both ways, depending on whether you are in a hurry or not.
I've spent the last few days trying to understand if I should use api blueprint, RAML or swagger.
It looks like swagger has the biggest community but the closer I look the more I feel that it greatly lacks in documentation (I was forced to look at the code many times to try and integrate it with my current project), many github issues and stackoverflow questions are unanswered.
Is it possible that I am missing something here?
All I want is a tool to help me write the API documentation and test the endpoints.
Why must swagger become part of the server logic?? If I create swagger files in the editor and then serve them to the UI directly it breaks..
As far as I can tell it even makes the server slightly slower and forces the existence of many clumsily maintained integrations :p What am I missing here?
We're trying to work a lot on improving the documentation of Swagger. It's a bit more difficult when many of the projects are community-driven and not managed by a single organization.
We actually try to reply to issues on github quickly (we don't always succeed) and we have our own google group for general questions so we follow stackoverflow somewhat less.
The editor you mention is a new tool as part of the work on Swagger 2.0 and it's not final yet. As such, it still have a few bugs and missing features. The UI is also in the process of being adapted to Swagger 2.0 and the same limitations apply to it.
You most certainly don't have to integrate it with your server and you can expose the documentation statically. The advantage of integrating it with the server is that it's easier to maintain if the API changes.
You can try RAML + ramlev + Abao
The steps should be
Write API Spec in RAML with your fav editor, ie. Atom, vim
Validate your RAML with ramlev
Implement the server logic according API Spec
Validate server logic with Abao
I know this question is too wide to be answered with a simple "use this framework", but I would really appreciate your advice on that one.
I'm looking to make a (quite complex) project than will run over an API. I'm open to any programming language (PHP, Python, Java mostly) and found many frameworks that are more oriented to make a RESTful web server.
The only major constraint I have is that I would have a reusable, simple and not-code-spaghetti independent package in order to improve my API later easily or even switch to an other framework with no pain.
For Python & Java, I thought about making a dedicated package. Each action would call the dedicated method in the package, the package would return object/dict and the action would transform it to the proper format.
After many research, I hesitate between two framework that could be good for my work but I need your advice because I wouldn't make any mistakes here.
Play! Framework (Java)
Pros :
Router are RESTFul oriented (you define the method (GET, POST, etc), the request and the class.method to use)
You don't have to make one class per action
Cons :
The Model is already included. If I later change the framework, maybe I will be stuck with it (but apparently not since Play! seems to use JPA)
Maybe the fact that if I want to send parameters to the action that would be defined in the method signature, I have to adopt the ClassName.properties instead of a json like {ClassName: {properties: 'value'}}
Tornado Web (Python)
Pros :
Seems to be very powerful : used by FriendFeed (at least) !
Auth via major OpenId, OAuth and Facebook already implemented
Very light (could be a problem)
Cons :
Not so popular : you understand better the work by going into the code than the doc
Urls seems to be very basics (As far as I saw it, you have to define all the urls in one file, with all the class included)
One Class per action (that could be heavy)
Decorators for the basic (testing if user is auth, etc) must be made
For using them in production, it would be easily possible with apache & mod_proxy or nginx.
So, my questions is quite simple : what would you choose (between those two or others, I'm not closed to suggestions) and why ?
Thank you really much for your advice!
My favorite RESTful Web App development framework is Restlet. It's a Java framework/library (it can be thought of as either) but it works well with Jython and JRuby, so if you prefer those languages you could still use it. I mostly use it with Groovy.
I prefer Restlet because:
Its API fully embraces and aligns with RESTful paradigms, so it encourages you to work RESTfully. For example, when a Router routes a request to a ServerResource, it creates a new instance of the ServerResource for every request. This encourages the implementation to be stateless. And there's a rich class hierarchy with all the concepts required to implement a RESTful web app: Client, Server, Protocol, VirtualHost, Request, Response, MediaType, Status, etc.
Its API includes classes for writing both servers and clients, and they're very consistent and almost symmetrical. For example, there's a ServerResource class and a ClientResource class. ServerResource.get() and ClientResource.get() both return a Representation. The only difference is that you implement ServerResource.get() and generate a response representation, while you call ClientResource.get() and receive a response representation.
The API is consistent with Java conventions. For example, if a request made with ClientResource.get() receives an error response such as 401, a ResourceException will be thrown. And if you're implementing a ServerResource and want to return an error status, you just throw a ResourceException (which is a RuntimeException, which is nice).
Via its extension mechanism, it plays very nicely with a broad array of the best Java libraries around. Extensions are included for various HTTP client and server libraries, databases, templating libraries, security libs, data libs such as XML, JSON, OAuth, OData, etc., and even OSGI.
Deployment is very flexible. You can embed a Restlet-powered API in an existing Java app, an existing Java Servlet app, or any standard Java Web App (Servlet) server. Or you can build a stand-alone server app with an embedded HTTP server such as Jetty — that's my preferred approach. And because it runs on the JVM, it runs on almost any hardware or OS.
It's mature, reliable, responsibly maintained, steadily improving, and well supported both by the community and commercially.
It's open source, and has very clear and well-structured code. The developers are happy to accept any contributions. I've submitted a few patches and had them committed to trunk quickly with no drama.
Other options I'd suggest would be the Python microframework Bottle and the Ruby microframework Sinatra. They're both simple, straightforward, lightweight, and effective. And because they work with the WSGI and Rack stacks, there's a rich set of "middleware" modules which can easily be used with them.