Can someone point me to a tutorial or some resource that will show me how I can download or use a sql database from a web server and use that content in an app. I want to control content in an app dynamically, such that each time the app is launched, it loads content from the database and uses that to populate the app.
There are many ways to answer this question, but basically you should create a REST service (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/tutorials/j-rest/) in the language of your choice.
This will connect to the SQL Server database.
Then you create a REST client in your program (consuming restful web service in iOS 5), and you can then interact with the database.
RestKit is an excellent library for build the iOS-side of a rest-driven system. Very actively supported, too. Has a nice tie-in for core data, too.
Related
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site the following is stated, The Parse hosted backend will be fully retired on January 28, 2017 does this mean this is obsolete and I should avoid using this?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.
Hi exalted sages of the development world,
I humbly come before thee with a noob question. I'm actually pretty excited about Windows 8 Metro HTML5/Javascript development, but I haven't dived in to it yet. One initial question that immediately came up that Google has failed me on so far is how do I do local data access with metro HTML apps? I understand that I can use some of the new HTML5 local storage features, but what do I do say if I want to have an application that writes/receives data to say a SQL CE database on the local machine as opposed to a remote one? Is there some kind of programmable built in object that I can access with Javascript to do data manipulation with that would take the traditional place of a web server?
Thank you for your time.
There is no client for SQL access in WinRT. To access such databases, you have to create a web service and call it (similarly to Silverlight). WCF RIA Services are supported for this.
To store and retrieve data locally, there is JET API. HTML and JavaScript apps support IndexedDB. All these options read and write data to the app’s isolated storage; they do not enable free access to the file system.
Taken from http://www.itwriting.com/blog/4874-data-access-in-windows-8-winrt.html
I have the following scenario:
We develop a silverlight 4 app for our customers, that will be used as an out-of-browser app. The app is working offline, i.e. app and database are on the users local machine. The app is using WCF-RIA-services to connect to the local database. The database will be an SQL Server Express, SQL Server CE or MySQL. We are using MVVMLight and MEF.
An external webserver is only used for updating the app from time to time or adding new modules to the app. To achieve this we do something similar as shown in Jeremy Likness blog (http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jlikness/archive/2010/05/25/silverlight-out-of-browser-dynamic-modules-in-offline-mode.aspx )
The reasons why we are doing such a scenario are complex. But to keep a long story short it is mainly for compatibility reasons for a later online version and we don't want to use WPF. So we need to get this working with Silverlight and WCF-RIA services.
Ok, that's the scenario and here's the question:
Do we need a local webserver in this scenario? The app is programmatically installed as out-of-browser, the database is local and connected via WCF-RIA.
If yes, which webserver would be sufficient? It should be installed and configured via an initial setup that is executed by the customer. The customer should not have to do anything with configuring the webserver.
Any other ideas or comments on this scenario? Any other possible solutions for this?
Thanks for your help
Dirk
silverlight wasn't meant to be used this way I think. So it would be like when you are developing app in visual studio and use Cassini to see result - everything runs locally - but you still need a web server. Maybe more info here - http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/WPF-vs-Silverlight
I´m not able to provide with a full answer to your problem, as we are currently facing the same problem. (WPF not being cross-platform, Very specific hardware on some clients)
But I may share some of our thoughts on our type of Thick-Silverlight-Client:
To keep deployment etc. simple we use a self-hosting process (installed as background process)
We may not use RIA as the background process has to run using Mono VM (but for MS-only solution see Can WCF RIA Services be self hosted? )
Architectural thoughts on standalone "Clients":
Depending on your requirements implementing a server for each client communicating with the "main"-server by messages (NServiceBus) may be overkill. But if you want to use a client database if offline and silverlight for ui you should consider using an event-driven-architecture.
There is a slideshow on combining "Event-Driven-Architecture" & "CQRS" with Silverlight. But i would not use it as a blueprint more like an inspiration.
http://www.slideshare.net/dennisdoomen/cqrs-and-event-sourcing-an-alternative-architecture-for-ddd
I am in the process of integrating our custom web app with QuickBooks Enterprise 9. My thought is that I could use QuickBooks as my "database" of sorts. When a person creates an invoice, the invoice is actually stored only in QuickBooks. When a person views a list of invoices, they are actually viewing a list of QuickBooks invoices. I want to make sure the data is stored in only one location.
I realize that I could use the QB Web Connector, but the problem with that is I wouldn't have control over when the requests to QB actually get processed (That job is up to the Web Connector).
So I have my web UI to act as the QuickBooks "face," but I don't have any good way to get to and from the QuickBooks file located on an internal server. What I was thinking was that I could create a WCF web service and install it on the QuickBooks server. The web service could then be my integration point. My custom web app could then consume the web service and, viola, I have access to my QuickBooks files.
My question is this: Can a WCF app connect and run QuickBooks? If not, could i create a Windows service to act as my point of integration? If so, can my custom web app "consume" a windows service?
I'll start by warning you that QuickBooks probably isn't your best choice for a reliable back-end database accessible from a remote website. In fact... it's probably a really, really bad choice.
You should have your own application database, and then if you need to also exchange data with QuickBooks, do that outside of the normal lifecycle of your app, as a separate sync process.
QuickBooks generally isn't reliable enough for always-online type of applications due to a number of reasons:
Flaky SDK connections
Updates and single-user mode will
lock you out of accessing QuickBooks
Difficulty in establishing SDK connections from non-GUI processes (Windows Services and IIS processes)
With that said...
Yes, you could create a WCF web service, host it on the QuickBooks machine, and make your WCF web service relay messages to/from QuickBooks.
Yes, you could also create a Windows Service that does the same sort of thing.
Do NOT implement it as a Windows service, and do NOT implement it within IIS - instead implement it as a GUI app that runs alongside QuickBooks.
If you try to implement things as a Windows service or within IIS, the QuickBooks SDK requires you have a GUI available (it users a GUI COM message pump for events dispatching or something like that...) to process requests, so you'll probably need to use something like QBXMLRP2e.exe to straddle the process boundary between QuickBooks and your non-GUI Windows service/IIS. My experience has been that it's a gigantic pain in the butt, and requires mucking with DCOM permissions as well.
I have an example and some documentation on my QuickBooks integration wiki.
The IDN Forums are a good place to ask questions.
My recommendation to you would be to either:
Use the Web Connector and QuickBooks
and give up hope of keeping all of your data in one place. Cache the data in a real database, and update it by querying QuickBooks periodically. I'm almost done building a solution to do exactly this right now, and it works fantastic.
OR
Use a different account system. NetSuite is pretty nice. I'm not sure what else is out there, but if I were you I'd look for something SQL-based or with a strong SOAP/REST API.
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.