I making a SPA (single page application) and want to show the number of online users and app visits in the admin panel like this:
online users: 5 people
Today visits: 12 people.
This Year visits: 5263 people.
I don't know what the proper procedure is for implementing this.
What I'm doing as a solution is to make an endpoint at the server for computing number of online users and visits. In the client I've created a random string as UserKey and saved it into localStorage.Then I've used setInterval to send a request with UserKey payload to the endpoint every 5 minutes. This endpoint calculates the number of online users and visits based on UserKey and current date and time. Calculating Is not 100% Accurate but it's satisfactory for me.
I'm not sure if I'm in the right way. Please share me your advice.
You can simply do it with Navigator.onLine :
Source
Websockets (pusher) should be a right solution for your case. This way you don't have to poll every 5 minutes.
See https://pusher.com/docs/channels/getting_started/javascript/?ref=docs-index
It is free but just for 50 users if you want more users you can also choose to start an own Websocket server. Which is a little more complicated (without external libraries of course).
Related
I have just developed a mobile apps which basically for users to upload, download photoes, add, update, search , delete, refresh transaction, and query report. Every action need submit request to Appengine Server.
I am using CloudEndpoint, oAuth2.0 and Objectify to implement this appengine. When I'm testing alone, The instance hours has used up 40% . How much billing for instance can I imagine if 100 people using this app? How does it calculate the instance hours? by request of submitting? or by time of instance working on multiple request??
is it worth?
If my target is more than 100 users to using my apps. Is it worth? Could you please share me what exactly I misunderstood about this instance.
Thanks
As others have commented, the question is very hard to answer. The easiest answer I can think of is by looking at the response header "X-AppEngine-Estimated-CPM-US-Dollars". You have to be a member of the Cloud Platform Project (see the Permissions page in Cloud Platform developers console) to see this header (you can check it in your browser).
The header tells you what the cost of the request was in US Dollars multiplied by 1000.
But think of it as an indication. If your request spawns other processes such as tasks, those costs are not included in the number you see in that header.
The relationship between Frontend instance hours and the number of requests is not linear either. For one, you will be charged a number of minutes (not sure if it's 15 minutes) when the instance spins up. And there are other performance settings that determine how this works.
Your best bet is to run the app for a while against real users and find out what the costs were in a given month or so.
I am trying to build an open-source python code hosted at GAE to sync contacts by group to a limited number of users. In a web interface users will be able to pick their group and whom it will be synced with.
I understand there is a lot of applications on market place withe the same functionality, but my organization is concerned about those provides selling contacts to 3rd parties. We are a non-profit organization, so the code could be hosted at google project or github for community contribution.
(sorry for the long intro)
How is the best way to start? is there tutorial available with similar functionality that I can expand?
What is the best way to compare two Contact kind elements? To see if they need to be sync.
Is there a last update on the Contact kind elements? In case I want to implement a last update wins?
thanks!
I don't know of any tutorials for syncing and comparing contacts specifically, but there is a getting started guide for the Google Contacts API at https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/.
The contacts are sent as XML blobs, so you could compare two contacts by parsing them and looking at the individual elements within them. I don't think there's a better way to do this but there are libraries to handle it for you.
There is a last updated field sent as part of the contacts when retrieving them with the API. It is an XML element labeled <updated>.
how are you getting different user's contacts feeds?
i tried to save the tokens in the datastore when the
users grant the access, but when i get the token back
from datastore for 2 users at a time, after an hour
when the token expires,
all tokens start working like the current users token
and i can only get current users contacts.
token = Get_Shared_User_Token(user_email)
contact_client = gdata.contacts.client.ContactsClient(source=USER_AGENT)
authorized_client = token.authorize(contact_client)
contacts_feed = authorized_client.GetContacts(q = query)
can you please tell how one can get any user's contacts?
We currently develop a portal in asp.net mvc2 with fluent nhibernate on amazon cloud servers which have lots of user which buying or selling shares. Also they comment every where and make other activities.
Portal is actually behave like multiple portals which we called Community. Our basic statistics based on users activity (buy,sell, comment etc). We have a basic structure called TopUsers. Which we show top user home page for all topics for loggedin community. On topic page we show top users for current topic etc.
Because of a lot of calculation I want to make a top users table. I am waiting for recommentations for this?
Your approach (separate table that gets periodically repopulated) is correct, except for the interval: your users will not be fanatically clicking on your site every minute to see updated stats, so after a certain threshold of data there isn't much point in refreshing your top users this often. Doing it once per day will usually be good enough.
I have a website and I would like to implement a paid subscription service. Its a simple service with only 2 types of plans. For now, ill just use Paypal. But im a little lost before start, mainly with the data model.
My main question for now is, what information do I need to keep for each subscription? Do I need to implement a shopping cart for this (dont think so)? Im not asking for a detailed explanation, just a few lights or resources to find a way to start. Thanks.
Depends on what technology you're using. Basic payments work a bit like this
-> You send them to paypal with a plan (you define the plan on paypal)
they know which amount to charge
you can pass custom parameters which they will pass back
Customer fills in application
<- paypal tells you that your predefined plan got purchased
in this same request, they send a lot of info about the payment including a GUID and your params
-> you ask paypal "hey, some one just told me this plan GUID got purchased, can you confirm"
<- paypal service returns 'yes'
-> you take the customer's ID from the params that you attached when you sent them to the paypal service and update them to "paid" in the database, or whatever
That's it in a nutshell...
Look at any subscription card mailer from any magazine and you can get an idea of what kind of data you will have to record. Start and end date for the subscription would be a good thing to keep, and what kind of plan the user is subscribed to. Once you have the end date, you just need to run a query to get the records of the users that have access. Something like
Select * from users where subscription_end_date is >= today
I'm sure there will be a lot of other columns that will go into your final product, but that will be up to you to decide what data you want to keep. What are the different states that a subscription can be in? Can someone be subscribed to both services at the same time?
PayPal does a decent job if you want to charge the same amount every month. However, if you anticipate your users making changes to their subscription plans (upgrades/downgrades) or needing to provide credits to their account for customer support purposes, PayPal would require that you cancel the subscription...and then have the customer re-subscribe.
[Full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Recurly.com]
Recurly handles the upgrades and downgrades, and provides automated customer emails to be sent out to your customers (on your behalf) for every event confirmation, and invoice that occurs. You also have a full account management dashboard and reporting so that you don't need to build this yourself.
Best of all, if you ever decide to leave PayPal, and move your business to a standalone payment gateway, Recurly stores all of your credit cards in a PCI compliant vault so you don't need to ask you customers to come back and re-subscribe. (PayPal will not return your customer credit card information). You simply configure your new gateway in Recurly, and payments will be processed without any interruption to your business.
Here is a blog post we wrote on the topic:
http://blog.recurly.com/2010/08/top-ten-reasons-to-use-recurly-vs-paypal-for-recurring-billing/
-Best of luck.
-Dan
I want to write a program that analyzes your fantasy baseball team and notifies you of recommended actions, possibly multiple times per day. The problem is, you aren't playing fantasy baseball on my site, you're playing on yahoo, or cbs, or espn, etc.
On the majority of these sites, fantasy teams and leagues are not public, so you must be logged in and a member of the league to see the teams in the league.
All that I need is the plain html for the team page on each of those sites to be sent to my server, where I can then parse and analyze the file and send user notifications.
The problem is that I need username/password combinations to easily get this data to my server when I need it, and I think there will be a lot of people who wouldn't want to entrust their yahoo/espn/cbs password to me.
I have come up with several possible ways to solve this problem:
The most obvious way is to ask for their credentials for the site on which their team is hosted. Then I could just programmatically log in and request the data I need. I'm guessing a number of people would be comfortable giving me their credentials, and a number of them not so much.
Write a desktop client, which the user then downloads. The client would require their credentials, but it could then basically do exactly the same thing that the server based version would do, log in, request the page, and send the page back to my server. The difference being that their password would never need to leave their desktop. Their computer would need to be on, and this program running for this method to work.
Write browser add-ons that navigate to the page I need, use the cookie that is saved from a previous login to login to the site, and send the page back to my server. This doesn't require my software to ever ask for their password, but if the cookie expires I am hosed, and I don't know much about browser add-ons besides.
I'm sure there are other options, but these are what I've come up with so far.
I have two questions:
1. What are the other possibilities for this type of task?
2. Am I over-estimating people's reluctance to give me their yahoo (for example) password? Is option (1) above the obvious choice?
It was suggested in the comments that I try yahoo pipes, and that looked like a promising suggestion so I explored it a bit. Having looked now at this, I don't think that is an option. So, it looks like I'll be going with option 1.
This is a problem I grappled with a couple of years ago when I wanted to do the same thing. Our site is http://benchcoach.com and the options we were considering were the following:
Original we considered getting the user's credentials and login. We would then log in and scrape their league and team info. The problem there is that after reading several of the various terms of service, this would definitely be violating the terms of service. On top of this, Yahoo! was definitely one of the sites we were considering and their users have email (where we could get access to sensitive data), and Yahoo! wallet. In addition, it would be pretty trivial for Yahoo/ESPN/CBS to block our programmatic logins by IP Address.
The solution we settled on (not 100% happy but it does seem to work) was asking our users to install a bookmarklet (like delicious, digg or reddit) which would post the current html page to our servers, where we could parse the data and load our database. If they were still logged into their Yahoo/ESPN/CBS account, we would direct them directly to the pages, otherwise, those sites would prompt for authentication. Clicking the bookmarklet once more, would post the page to our servers.
The pros of this approach was that we never collected anyone's credentials so any concern of security would have been alleviated. Secondly, it would make it impossible for Yahoo/ESPN/CBS to block access to our service since we would never be connecting directly to their servers but rather the user's browser would be posting the contents of their browser to our server.
The problems with this is that it takes 2 clicks to post a page to our site. For head to head leagues, we needed 3-4 pages so it would take our user 6-8 clicks to sync their league to our servers. We're still looking at options for this.
One important note is that I ran into the product manager of the Yahoo Fantasy Football site at a conference a year ago. We talked about how we were getting the Yahoo data, and he confirmed that getting credentials would violate their TOS and they may stop us. While I don't think they would have, it would have made it hard to invest time and energy to develop this only to have them block our site and pissing of users by closing their accounts.
A potentially more complicated answer could possibly be done with (for example) yahoo pipes.
Hypothetically, you create a pipe which prompts the user for their credentials and provides them with a url which contains their scraped data. They enter this URL in their site, and never have to provide their credentials directly. Even better, for the security-conscious, it would be possible to examine what the pipe was actually doing before entering any information.
The downside would be increased complexity (as well as you'd have to write and maintain the pipe). Having said that, you could provide a link directly to the published pipe from your site, to make things as easy as possible.
Option 1 is the obvious choice. People who trust your site will provide the details. There is no other way you can login to other site while screen scraping.