I will soon make a mobile application. For the front-end I will use React native and for the back-end I want to make an API but I don't know which technology to use, Django REST API, express js?
My problem is with regard to the videos to store, which technology is going to be the most suitable for storing them?
So, what technology would you use to create an API that can store videos properly and that will be called by react native?
There is no simple answer to a question like this. It all depends on your expectations, experience, resources, time, etc. It is also a very subjective question because most developers have their own preferences about these solutions. The truth is that you can build a solution in A LOT of different ways. Besides the JS frameworks you suggest, popular choices are .NET, PHP, C#, Ruby, Java and Python... and much more!
Besides the backend / API, you will also need a server for hosting your API and maybe another type of server for storage.
If you want to build everything yourself, take a look at the services provided by AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean. If you have limited experience building backends and want to save time, take a look at Google Firebase or Heroku.
The last two are plug-and-play solutions for expecially mobile apps like the one you are describing.
Check it all out and make your own opinion!
Good luck with your project! :-)
I am new in Yii. I want to know is SQL injection or any hacking possible in the Yii web application? If possible how to avoid that problem?
Yes. Any "hacking" is possible in any web application.
Because no software makes an application safe, but a programmer. Yii is only a tool, but how to use it is entirely up to one who uses it.
So, you have to learn how to use Yii and technology and security basics in general. Without such education that cannot be done by means of asking and answering just one question, one cannot create a safe application.
To make this answer not entirely off topic, as long as you're using Yii ActiveRecord, you can consider your code SQL injection safe, because AR takes the trouble of creating SQL queries for you.
Yeah. It depends to the programmer how he/she use the code, If executed correctly.. Try to read the document of Yii, they show it how to use the code properly and to make it anti sql injection.
Yes. The saying "Security is insecurity." is a big issue in web security.
Everything is hack-able, but it depends on the security of system & performance of the device trying to hack. If the hacker trying to hack a website by a Normal PC may takes Millions of year, but using a Quantum Computer may break within a second.
In case of web application build from Yii PHP Framework, it may also be hack-able. Some how this framework provides strong security measures.
Alright. I know this may draw some heat as "not good question"/etc., but I haven't found anywhere describing the process in particular (all the resources I've found describe the client-side requesting, not the server-side responses).
I'm going to be working on writing an iOS app in the next coming months necessitating the use of a web server. There are many resources on how to set these up, get them a static IP, etc. but I haven't found any clear ones (and by clear, I mean intelligible by someone not already experienced in it) on how to write a program for such a server that actually responds to the HTTP or client request.
Suppose I have a dummy app and web server combo where the app posts an HTTP request for the time. How would I write an app for the server to bounce the time back when the request comes in? Ideally, I'd like to write this in Objective-C as it's the language I've had the most experience in (whether forced or by choice).
Again, I apologize if it isn't a good question or very clear - I just haven't found any resources that are able to give me much of a place to start.
Your question could probably be described as 'too broad', but I will give it a shot anyway. Disclaimer: I haven't written much server-side code but I have been programming in objc for years now.
The reason you haven't found (m)any resources to help you do what you want to do is because Objective-C is rarely used for writing server-side code. Exactly why that is the case is no doubt a long story, but essentially the answer is because many of the dominant technologies out there (PHP, Python, C#, Java, to name only the prevailing languages) have feaures and associated frameworks that are better suited for that purpose.
In other words, although I can doubltless be done, you are probably better off using something other than Objective-C for the task because:
You will have many more resources available to help you get your job done.
You will have a much larger community that you can query for assistance when (not if) you encounter an obstacle.
You will not have to do many things the hard way because there will be existing tools to make it easier.
I would also recommend you to use PHP as the server-side programming language.
Some mounths ago I was in the same situation as you. We have planned to write a app (Android) which loads some data from a webserver. I've never programmed server-side code till the beginning of the project. So it was quiet interessting and new for me.
We have choosen PHP as the server-side language.
All I can say is, that it was really easy to learn and write your first scripts to get a response to a HTTP-Request. Also the usage of MySQL as the database is really easy and it works fine with PHP.
PHP is a standard. You can find a huge amount of documentation and examples. And of course tutorials and good books ... ;)
APIs are getting more and more popular and are used by developers to ease the process of developing applications to multiple platforms AND allow them to give other developers the ability to integrate their application's functionality into their own applications.
I've used APIs countless times before, but I'm now at the stage of developing my own applications. And as a developer who strives to create multi-platform applications - I need to use an API.
I'm going to use the RESTful approach as it's recommended the most.
After reading and looking for some background information, I came across: REST API Tutorial (which is really good site!), I learned that APIs basically receive HTTP requests, and return data in JSON/XML format.
However, there were 2 questions left unanswered to me:
In what form do APIs come in? Are APIs actually files? a set of commands......?
How do I actually write APIs? I'm talking about the server-side, data-handling code, and not the application/language-specific code (for sending out HTTP requests etc...)
It'd be great if someone could help me and answer the questions above as I have zero experience with APIs.
Any help is appreciated - much thanks!!
Just a quick from-the-gut answer: They are whatever you want them to be!
Off the top of my head, I would define an API as requiring two main elements:
Some documentation which makes it quite clear how to use the logic your systems prvides
Some way to call those systems. That may be as simple as a web-site that accepts POST-messages, and checks them for certain variables and values in order to perform specific tasks.
In short, it should be entirely up to you. Just make sure you provide simple, clear and acurate documentation.
UPDATE, as an asnwer to the comment below:
That is how I interpret it, and it would seem that Wikipedia is more or less in agreement with me. PHP would be a perfect example: You could for instance create a PHP-file which processes a POST, and instead of outputting html, outputs XML with the resulting data needed. Then a third party app could POST to your PHP application, and receive and process the resulting XML.
Apis come as a response to a http request. It is a plain text response that u can use encoded via json or xml as you described.
There are a plenty of frameworks to help you develop and API.
In Ruby u can use grape or rais-api or even rails itself.
There is a lot more available, but this are the ones im most used to use.
I spend a lot of time (actually too much time) developping back-office applications whose main purpose is content management and web application configurations. Here is how I can describe these apps :
- Made with PHP
- Using a MySQL or Postgres or SQLite database
- Made of a lot of pages and features
- Very simple features, mostly data CRUD (create+read+update+delete into the database)
- Mostly made of forms
- UIs are usually quite simple (html + css + very basic javascript)
All of the data access code in these apps relies on a library I developped years ago and re-use every time I can. This part is not time-consuming.
What's time-consuming is the UI part, and mostly designing data-lists and forms. Using a WYSIWYG editor would make a lot of sense here, except those I tried (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression, Eclipse, ...) don't really make it much faster, because the generated code is often bloated, and these tools can't rely on custom libraries such as the one I made and use.
I figured using a Web Tookit could be another way to spend less time developping these tools. So before I spend too much time looking for the perfect toolkit, I would appreciate your opinions and experiences on that kind of matter.
Disclaimer : I'm not looking for advices on how MVC is the way to go and how CodeIgniter/Zend/WhatEver is the framework I should use. My question is not about the frameworks or the design patterns I should build my applications upon. My question is about using the right tool to make simple web-applications development faster, and their code even more re-usable.
Is there an awesome web-application RAD tool I don't know about ?
Which toolkit do you use for simple but form-heavy web applications ?
Are there good, light, non-bloated, reliable toolkits written in PHP ?
Thanks in advance !
Edit : Not getting much feedback so far :/ I'm aware that my question is very broad, but I'm sure lots of people work on the same kind of projects I'm talking about, and have improved their productivity by using toolkits such as GWT, Wicket and such. Tell me about it, please :)
September 28 edit : Thanks everyone for the interesting answers. What I'm looking for is not covered by any framework I could try in the past months. PHP is probably not the best language to use for my vision of RAD, but since it's a language I know very well, and since I don't want to spend too much time learning Python as well as I know PHP (for the moment), I decided to do it by myself. Everytime I have a specific need for a widget, I code it in the most re-usable way...so far so good :)
I might open-source that toolkit at some point, and will let you guys know.
The PHP project I've been working on the past few years is a lot like that. Heavy on forms, heavy on server-side logic, but lots of redundant form coding. Too make matters worse, it wasn't all forms, sometimes we actually need to do fancy layout (even just doing a tree control is a pain without a library), and the home-grown nature of the UI meant that I would be battling browser quirks from start to finish.
So, I got to thinking about what a better architecture would be. We needed very powerful form controls, rich grids, rich trees, advanced layout, and we needed to migrate to that gradually. None of the PHP frameworks seemed to fit. Then I took a step back and realized that it didn't have to be PHP, it could be javascript also. We already had a requirement on javascript, so it was fine to go the distance with it. First I looked at the smaller libraries, jquery, prototype, but it became obvious that they didn't do enough. So I looked at Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, all the really heavy javascript toolkits, and settled on ExtJS as having the best controls.
We had a UI structure that relied heavily on iframes, a navigation frame on the outside, application frames inside that, feature frames inside that, and so on. What we ended up with is we're migrating those from the outside in. It's all becoming ExtJS, and it's all living in the same page. The server-side code is kept the same, but it's migrated into web services. At the same time we've integrated zend framework, and are porting some of the stuff you really shouldn't do home-grown to it, like authentication and translation.
The end goal is being able to write just the business logic without having to mess with all the boilerplate. It's too early to know if my approach will pan out, but I think my message would be to be critical towards your code base and decide which parts you want to keep writing yourself, and which parts you want to outsource to a library.
Please try http://agiletoolkit.org/. I think it's what you need. Results with minimum time/code.
At the moment I'm using a solid forms class to render HTML forms with client- and server-side validation, and a database class to write the SQL. I can get a CRUD section of my admin console up in about 10 lines of code. I wrote those classes myself so I can re-use them in all my projects. Hopefully that gives you some ideas?
I would stay away from WYSIWYG tools personally.
I'm testing NuBuilder.com, I discovered it does
within days, at first looks promising. If you take a look
please send me your feedbacks!
Maybe adopt or create an "app-based" infrastructure like Django's? In Django's case, the community has created some powerful baselines like Pinax.
I think Symfony may be the way to go because, like your apps:
it's written in PHP
ORM based on Propel/doctrine (so you can use MySQL, Postgres or SQLite)
Architecture and patterns used will help you with complex applicatons
You'll find tools helping you to debug, document, and test your application
Forms creation, validation, l10n & i18n, testing, AJAX is easy (forms within symfony explained here, check it out)
prototyping you webpages while developing your application is easy
Other tools/practices implemented in the symfony framework that will make your life easy:
full configuration using YAML syntax (easy to read and understand)
the scaffolding feature generates for you a simple CRUD interface for editing your data.
you don't have to worry about coding form sanitization, security, caching, ACL; configuration is needed, but no heavy coding.
The only downside, you need to read some documentation to understand "the symfony way of doing things". But hey, a good framework is 20% code and 80% good practices.
My point is, even if you don't want to use Symfony for your project, you should check its features and built-in tools, because that's the kind of tools you want for your project.
I started using Django and it has very helpful features, esp. the built-in admin (for general CRUD stuff) and really great form-handling code & widget rendering. I'd suggest taking a look, even if you don't plan on using python, just to get an idea.
You mentioned that you don't want advice on "Use X framework", since this is more about RAD & UI/forms than system architecture. But I've found that a good framework helps just as much with the UI & forms side of things as it does the architecture. That means that while frameworks are great for big projects, they're also very helpful in reducing code redundancy. I started creating my own helper functions in PHP that I would copy from app to app that would automatically render an HTML form based on a few parameters. Even after a lot of work, this was very rudimentary compared to what Django offers, and basically I was writing my own framework.
I think you may be looking for a GUI-style tool to help, but you might find that a good PHP framework is more helpful in this case. At the very least, have you tried creating your own helper libraries? I know those helped me a lot.
Simple Example:
function renderInput($name, $value="") {
print "<input type=\"input\" name=\"" . htmlentities($name) . "\" value=\"" . htmlentities($value) . "\" >";
}
function renderRadios($name, $value="", $choices=array()) {
for ($choices as $cvalue) {
print "<input type=\"checkbox\" name=\"" . htmlentities($name) . "\" value=\"" . htmlentities($cvalue) . "\" " . ($cvalue == $value ? "checked" : "") . ">";
}
}
And build up from there. Stupid things like this tend to make form creation just that much faster. A good framework will blow this out of the water. And I'm sure the above has some typos, I haven't done PHP in a little bit.
If this isn't what you're looking for, could you add some more to the question? I'm curious.
Although you're asking for PHP + MySql, I would like to recommend you to give a try to the OutSystems Agile Platform.
You can create a simple CRUD app in less that 10 minutes and grow it as you go to a more complex system.
Download the Community Edition for free at www.outsystems.com.
Best,
Not sure but looks like Tibco General Interface (http://www.generalinterface.org ) is what your looking for.