When facebook rolls out a new version of their site, they show it to a percentage of users first.
How could I go about doing this cleanly?
Have your users sign up for your Beta.
Select a certain percentage of those who sign up for your Beta. As you make changes, keep incrementally adding some more testers. You don't want to let everyone in at once so you can get testing all the way up until the feature is complete and released. Look at stackoverflow as an example.
You would do this because most of the people who sign up will check out your beta version, then leave. They most likely will not come back / keep testing for you.
It is also better to opt-in than opt-out. Your users may not want to be your test subjects.
With a proxy that diverts some fraction of the sessions to one of two separate running instances. The proxy can be a software proxy on the hosting machine.
Well, depending on the change, if you have a farm of web servers you could apply the change to only some of the servers in the farm. That way only certain users who were "lucky" enough to hit one of the updated servers would see the change. Of course, this approach assumes that your web proxy will always route any given user to the same server (or group of updated servers) in the farm.
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What considerations are needed when creating a web app that is intended to be used in an industrial plant setting for a company? My specific use case is an industrial facility with several different production plants that would each have its own device for the application interface.
How do companies enforce the usage of such apps on a monitor/tablet? For example, could I prevent them from using other stuff on the tablet?
Importantly, how would security work? They'd share a device. There may be multiple operators that use the app in a given shift. Would they all use the same authentication session (this is not preferable, as I'd like to uniquely identify the active user)? Obviously I could use standard username/passwords with token based sessions that expire, however, this leaves a lot of potential for account hijacking. Ideally, they'd be able to log on very quickly (PIN, perhaps?) and their session would end when they are done.
As long as there is internet connection, I would presume that there isn't much pro/con regarding the use of native applications versus web based or progressive web apps. Is this assumption correct?
What's the best way of identifying which device the application is being run on?
Is this a common thing to do in general? What other technologies are used to create software that obtains input from industrial operators?
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Update - this is a good higher level consideration of the question at hand, however, it has become apparent why focused, specific questions are helpful. As such, I will follow up with questions that are specific.
Identifying the Area/Device a Web Application is Accessed On
Enforcing Specific Application Use on Tablets
Best Practices for Web App Authentication in Industrial Settings
I'm not able to answer everything in great detail but here are a few pointers. In the environment as you describe we usually see these two options. 1) you tell them what you need, internet, security, if they give you device and how it will be configured 2) they tell you exactly what you need to deliver.
I do not think you can 100% prevent them. We did it by providing the tablet( well laptops in our case) and the OS configuration took care of that, downside we had few devices to support. You seem to hint that there is always an internet connection so I guess you can collect all info about the system and send it back to you daily?
We were allowed to "tap" into their attendance SW and when you entered the facility you were able to use your 4 digit pin to log in if you were out of premisses you could not log in at all. I can imagine the following: you log in with your username and password - this does full verification, after that, you can use 4 digit pin to login for next n hours.
maybe, kinda, depends on what you are doing. Does the browser have all features you need? Our system needs multicast to perform really fast, so we have a native app
touched on this in 1. You could also use device enrolment process. You can also contractually force them that there will be only your software and it may invalidate support contract. It really depends on your creativity. My favourite( and it works - just tell them, there will only be installed my software and if not you will pay me double for support. I only saw one customer who installed some crap on the device when there were told not to
it really depends on what industry you are talking about, every industry is different. We almost always build a custom solution
The enforcement of the device/app usage depends on the customer, if the customer asked for help in the enforcement, then you can provide guide, training and workshops. If the customer serious about the enforcement then it will be a policy that's adapted by all the organization from top to down. Usually seniors will resist a workflow change more than juniors, so top management/executive should deal with that. Real life story: SAP team took 6 months to transform major newspaper workflow, during that few seniors got fired because they refuse to adapt the change.
Security shouldn't handicap the users, usually in industrial environment the network is isolated or at least restricted through VPN to connect multiple sites (plants in your case), regarding the active user: we usually provide guide/training/workshop for the users and inform them that using colleague account or device will prevent the system from tracking your accomplishment/tasks, so each user is responsible to make sure the active account/device is the one assigned to him/her.
It depends, with native you have more controls than web, but if the app is just doing monitoring then most of today apps use web for monitoring and the common way to receive input is REST APIs (even if the industrial devices doesn't support REST API, a middleware could be written to transform the output). If you need more depth about native vs web you need to ask new question with more details about the requirements.
Depends on the tech you are using (native or web), and things I mentioned in point 2: you can use whitelist of devices that's allowed to run the app. overall there are many best ways to track down the device.
How common in general? I think such information can only be achieved by survey, the world full of variations. And having something common not mean its safe or best, our industry keep changing at all levels. So to stay in the loop, we must keep learning and self-updating without reboot.
I know this is a difficult question but here it is, in context:
Our company has a request to build a WordPress website for a certain client. The caveat is that, on one day per year, for a period of about 20 minutes, 5,000 - 10,000 people will attempt to access the home page of this website. Their purpose: Only to acquire an outbound link to another site.
My concern is, no matter what kind of hosting we provide, the server may reject the connections after a certain number of connections are reached.
Any ideas on this?
This does not depend on WordPress. WordPress is basically software to render webpages: it helps you to quickly modify the content content of a page. Other software like for instance Apache accepts connections and redirects the calls to for instance WordPress.
Apache can be configured to accept more connections. I think the default is about 200. If that's bad really depends. If the purpose is only to give another URL, you can say that connections will be terminated fast. So that's not really an issue. If on the other hand you want to generate an entire page using PHP and MySQL it can take some time before a client is satisfied. In that case 200 connections are perhaps not sufficient.
As B-Lat points out. You can use cloud computing platforms like Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure that provide a lot of server power. But only bill their clients on the consumption on these resources. In other words you can accept thousands of connections at once. But you don't need to pay for the other days when clients visit your website less often.
I can't use Chargify, Recurly, Spreedly or any of those apps because I am not based in the US. I am in Jamaica, actually...so many of these companies don't support Jamaica.
But I am trying to roll a custom subscription management solution - but given that this is my first web app - I think it might be too big a task for me to take on.
Are there any gems that can handle this? These are the requirements:
All users registered automatically get on a free plan for X days
Towards the end of X days, they should be prompted to upgrade
If they don't upgrade, at the end of X days their account gets locked/disabled
If their account is disabled, they can upgrade and be taken to a checkout page (powered by 2checkout, because that is who I have to use for now).
Then once they upgrade, and have selected a plan, the system should automatically increase their allocations (# of clients, # of projects, storage space, etc.)
So I don't need the system to actually handle the processing of the credit cards, etc. It's more the logic of the subscription, restrictions on the models, upgrading and downgrading that I need.
The perfect solution would be a well supported Rails gem that I can include in my Gemfile.
If you don't have that, just send any/all possible solutions and I can take it from there.
Thanks.
You can look into Saasy. It's a stand alone Rails app (not a plugin) that you host on a subdomain and communicate with it using SSO/REST protocols. Probably won't fit your need as it is, but you may be able to extend it or get a general idea of how it works.
There is a great solution called Chargify, its one of Heroku available add-ons, you can see it here: https://addons.heroku.com/chargify and http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/chargify
With a reasonable rate, you can manage all the recurring/subscription billing in your Rails App, I hope this is useful answer.
When developing a website, I often need to test scenarios like this:
When user A logs in, she should see X button while user B can not
And doing this kind of testing requires me to do a lot of log in and log out with different test accounts, which is by no means convenient.
I wonder if there are any tool that can help me do this?
My suggestion would be to use two (or more, if needed) different browsers. They have their own sessions, therefore you can be logged in with both users at the same time.
As example, you can use Internet Explorer for one, and Mozilla Firefox for other user.
Pretty simple!
Update 16th of December, 2016:
Nowadays, when browsers have introduced private sessions (ie. Incognito for Chrome) you can just open this private session and log in with that. It won't use storage mechanisms related with main browser window.
Though, in Chrome, at least - opening two incognito windows won't make you get in total of 3 sessions. The incognitos, all live with a "single" session so to speak. Don't know about Firefox and others.
Apache JMeter is very good at this type of thing: -
http://jmeter.apache.org/
I suggest that using light-weighted service like eggPlant would be great.
Due to that multi-user testing can't be done entirely by serial testing(tests the web by a single user in a short period of time), we need do it concurrently(multiple users accessing the database in a short period of time). This kind of testing can point out some potential defects like bad database locking algorithm.
The other benefit: The service can save you a lot of time, which were spending on testing the web by yourself.
I need to track traffic between a specific set of web sites. I would then store the number of clicks in a database table with the fields fromSite, toSite, day, noOfClicks. The complete urls are unimportant - only web site identity is needed.
I've ruled out redirects since I don't want my server to be a single point of failure. I want the links to work even if the tracking application or server is down or overloaded.
Another goal is to minimize the work each participating site has to do in order for the tracking to work.
What would be the best way to solve this problem?
The best way is to use an analytics program like Google Analytics, and to review the reports for each domain.
Do you have access to the logs on all of the sites in question? If so, you should be able to extract that data from the log files (Referer header).
You could place an onclick event on to each link that goes between each site. the onclick would then call some javascript which could do a server call back to register the click.