is Google Calendar suitable as backend for a large application - calendar

I'm researching an excellent calendar service to host the events to a specific platform; the idea is to use a quick calendar service to host and manage our events.
Since our platform has a frontend, the customer doesn't have direct access to this calendar, instead, he'll use a frontend logic to create and manage events and our backend will link that business logic with a calendar service like Google Calendar service.
Our business logic will separate and organize many customers and different calendars (multi-tenant), allowing multiple customers to have a good experience with scheduling events and each one accessing his own list of events.
Is Google Calendar suitable as a calendar service backend for a large application like that?

After some research, I found that it is possible to use Google Calendar as a backend for my app. You can leverage that using Google Server-To-Server API or "Two-legged OAuth".
A Google API must be created in Google API panel
You must take care because Google API has a quota to limit your requests
If you want more allowance, you can request by contact Google office
More details in:
https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/php/auth/service-accounts
I'll go with my service from scratch. Also, I found a satisfying service.
- http://calendarserver.org/ (worth a try)

Related

How do I authenticate users of a web-app to access GCP data relevant only to them?

I have spent 3 days researching this problem and cannot find a solution or similar use case that shows how to solve the problem, so any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
I am creating a web-app that uses Google Cloud Storage and Bigquery. A user registers on the web app and then can upload data to Cloud Storage and Big Query. Two users could be from the same company and therefore should be able to view the same data - i.e. Jack and Jill work for company A and if Jack uploads a massive dataset via this app, Jill should also be able to view it later.
Another scenario will be I have two completely separate clients with users using this web-app. If users from Company A upload data, users from Company B should not be able to view Company A's data, and vice versa. But users from the same company should be able to view the data within their company.
Currently, I have an app that works for a single company. This has a React front-end that uses Firebase for authentication. Once the user is logged in, they can use the app which sends off API calls to a Flask back-end that does some error checking and authentication checking and then fires off an API call to GCP. This uses a service account and the key is loaded as an environment variable in the environment in which the Flask app is running.
However, if Company B want to use the app now, both Company A and Company B will be able to see each other's data and visualize it through the app. In addition, they will be sharing a project (I would like to change this to allocate billing more easily to have each client have their own project).
I ultimately want to get this app onto Kubernetes and ensure that each company is independent of each other, however, do not want to have to have separate URL's for every company using the app. Also, I want to abstract GCP away from the client. I would prefer to authenticate a user based on their login credentials and then they will be given access to their GCP project (via my front-end) accordingly.
I thought about perhaps having separate service keys for each client and then storing the service key info in Firebase, while using the respective keys for API calls but not sure this is best practice. It is however the only strategy I can think of.
If anyone could provide some help or guidance it would be very much appreciated. This is my first GCP project and have not been able to find any answers on GCP, SO, Google Groups, Slack or Medium.
Thanks,
TJ
First if all, welcome on GCP! It's an awesome platform, very powerful and flexible. But not magic.
Indeed, the use case that you describe is specific to your business logic. GCP provides told for securing access for user and VM(through service account) but not for customer. Here you have to implement your own custom and authorisation logic, with a database (I don't recommend bigquery for website, the latency is too high) to list three users, the companies where they work, the blobs of each company...
Nothing is magic and your use case specific.
If you want to discuss more about which component to use and to start, no problem. Let a comment.

How can I make free/busy information available across Calendar server, Google apps and Exchange?

As some background, my company is currently using an Apple Calendar server, some Exchange servers and a Google Apps subscription to provide calendaring for different parts of the organization. I've been tasked with providing free/busy access across these services while we try to take at least one of the services out of the equation.
I've attempted to use Google Interop, but it does not work with Exchange 2013 due to Microsoft eliminating Exchange Public Folder Databases in that release. I've also set up an IIS WebDAV server to attempt to share calendars, but this has shortcomings as well because only one person is able to moderate the calendar, and f/b data can't be queried in the Apple Calendar app - you have to subscribe to a separate f/b calendar.
Are there any suggestions as to how I should proceed?
If you can write your own connectors for each service (ie using propietary API's) you could then expose that information through a custom caldav service.
For example you could use http://milton.io (java) or http://sabre.io/ (php), both allow pulling data from arbitrary data sources.

Showing Google Analytics Data in real time

I would like to show number of visitors on a site since beginning of the month, number of users on the current day and currently on site.
I have Google Analytics installed, I tried to solve this issue with Embed API by enabling Google Analytics API from developer console - but I requires user authorization, etc.
What would be the easiest way to show analytics on-site without user authentication and accepting access by Embeded API, etc. Application is written in Angular, so Javascript API is the one I look for.
Thank you for any suggestion.
Authorization has to happen in order to get the data you want. Either you can let visitors to your site authorize themselves, or you'll have to authorize server-side on their behalf.
Once authorized, you can do something similar to what the Third Party Visualization Embed API demo shows. It uses a custom ActiveUsers Embed API component and includes the source code to show how it works.
Whether you use the ActiveUsers component or not, the basic gist is that once the users is authenticated via the Embed API, you have access to the method gapi.client.analytics.data.realtime.get, which you can use to query this data.
Here's where that happens in the source code for the ActiveUsers component:
https://github.com/googleanalytics/ga-dev-tools/blob/master/src/javascript/embed-api/components/active-users.js#L69-L87
Authentication with the Analytics service is mandatory. But the OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts (for Server to Server Applications) can be used to automate it in many cases.
It's unclear to me (from a quick scan) if the Auth options of the Embeed API would work with the automated authentication scheme, you may want to go through the details.
You should be able to use the Analytics Core Reporting API and maybe the Analytics Real Time Reporting API (beta) which work with the automated authentication according to their guides (look for the Authorisation sections on the left frames of the respective guides).
Donno if this qualifies as easy, tho, YMMV :)

Notifications and Syncing Exchange/Office-365 Calendars

I'm working on an application (server-side) that requires syncing calendar events.
The application is intended to work with both Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange calendar services. I already have the Google calendar syncing in place thanks to their use of web-hook notifications when a resource changes, but I'm having trouble figuring out what method to use with Microsoft's service.
All I've been able to find when searching for a Microsoft solution has been related to EWS. Does the Office 365 calendar API provide any sort of notification mechanism? Am I missing some link/relation between O365 and EWS?
Thanks!
We are working on offering webhooks and sync for Office 365 Mail, Calendar and Contact REST APIs, especially for Calendar. Stay tuned.
[UPDATE] You can use Exchange Web Services in the interim. Take a look at SyncFolderItems, SyncFolderHierarchy, and Notifications. In the Notifications doc, you need to look at the info for Push Notifications.
If you are using O365, you will likely want Streaming Notifications as opposed to Push Notifications.

Google App Engine App interoperability

I have tried searching the info regarding applications on GAE within same domain talking to each other but so far I don't have any luck. There was a post here but I don't know if that answer is correct.
You could also run the two different "apps" as different versions of the same appid. Then they share the datastore. Also, urlfetch.fetch() calls to paths of the same app are treated specially, they are faster and don't require authentication (they count as if they are logged in as admin).
I believe you will be best served by exposing a REST API for both your applications, so that they can read/write information as needed.
For e.g. If one of your apps is an Invoicing App and the other app needs only read access to Invoices, you can expose an API in the Invoice App for:
searching invoices by some filter
providing the Invoice detail, given an Invoice ID
Exposing an API will keep the applications loosely coupled with each other and will allow you to enhance the API as more requirements emerge. In the future, you can even have other clients like a mobile app access the API.

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