The problem description is as :
I have an existing app. developed in php. I have to transform that in rails.
I have to develop enterprise version of same point 1 app. with additional functionality and complexity for enterprise related work . I have developed this one as enterprise_app as app. name.
I have implemented devise n pundit in point 2 app.(enterprise) but I need to implement authentication and authorization on my own for point 1 app. in rails.
I would not like to mix the model's from both apps. or should I do that (your suggestions), since basic functionalities are same. But I would not like to break point2 enterprise app. in any cost.
I would like to have different interfaces for both app.
I would like to have point 1 app. running from inside of point 2's app.
I would like to use same db for both app. but with different tables, and the major point to keep in mind is - there should be no security related problems for point2_enterprise app. from tables and code from point1 app. Is my sense for security wright or there can or can't be security issues (need your knowledge).
Now, I would like to know - what will be the best approach for above scenarios?
Are my assumptions above proper, I would like to know your suggestions and assumptions.
I have been working in rails for almost 6 months, I think this is a great challenge for me. and time to learn and implement rails-internals and OOP.
What necessary concepts should I need to know and learn for solving above problem?
Hoping you guys got the clue, else please comment, I will try to clear as possible. Happy Coding guys !!!
Related
I have little by little built a website over the course of the past year and am now at a stage where the whole thing can go commercial, which means that I will face some tough questions regarding security, privacy, etc.
Since this is a situation where a hobby turned into a possible professional product, I am now rethinking how far I have to take this in order to really provide a product that is considered "safe" and stable.
The website was put together based on a Bootstrap 3 theme design, runs mostly on HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP with Mysqli interactions and naturally has a SSL certificate. About a dozen plugins from various websites such as datatables, PHPmailer, jQuery-bootstrap-upload, blueimp gallery, etc. do the things I need them to do and I have always paid attention to properly mysqli_real_escape input values and write error handlers for all interactions. In short, there is no real framework here, things are more thrown together.
I am now being challenged that this is not considered a safe/stable solution and instead should recreate the whole website based on the CakePHP framework, which is something I am not familiar with and will take a fair amount of time to get used to and will definitely screw up my timeline.
So in short what I am asking is this: How important is it for a small and relatively simple website (i really dont do any complex code here...) to be built on a framework such as CakePHP in order to be perceived as safe and secure?
I understand there is no real answer to this, but I was just wondering whether building on an established framework like CakePHP is considered the only way to go or if a custom made framework is acceptable.
Thanks for the advice.
I was in your situation a couple years ago. I had started a site that, in the first year had about ~50 unique visitors. The second year I had about ~1500 unique visitors. What does this mean to a developer.
Optimize the response time - caching.
You need to optimize how you fetch data. Can you cache some queries? - CakePHP comes with caching Redis, Memcached etc.
Multiple Datasources - ElasticSearch, Mysql, Redis
Now that my website is huge, visitors might start to demand more functionality from the website. How do i deal with multiple datasources? CakePHP offers ways to interact with multiple datasources like ElasticSearch, Mysql, Redis
Code maintenance - Raw code vs a Framework
Do I need to google, and stackoverflow to reinvent the wheel? CakePHP comes with the best templating system and helpers.
Cutting down on development time.
If I am coding everything myself - I will spend more time developing. Using CakePHP I spend more time improving my website's data.
Decoupling
Does my data need to be managed by Cakephp, can I use Django, REST APIs etc. In the end I decoupled my website. I use Django to manage data entry, and CakePHP to present the data to visitors using Django REST framework.
No one can tell you definitely use CakePHP. However CakePHP3 , in my professional opinion, has a short learning curve. Using namespaces you can still use your current code in CakePHP and transition slowly into using CakePHP fully. CakePHP documentation is very good. You should be able to get a basic site wrkoing within an hour.
I want to choose ATK (http://agiletoolkit.org) as my framework for easily build the admin part, I have 2 questions.
In their site, I see that the last blog post was a year a go.
Is this project continuing?
Should I use this framework in the site AND the admin? I am a bit confused about using it in the site side? Or maybe I should use another framework (which will create an overhead)..
Edit
I am a developer that is coming from JAVA and .net mostly.
I am a freak of service reuse because I have an experience on a large scale projects.
I see that ATK4 is not a classic REST based.
Lets examine this situation if I may:
Just as an example, I have a registration form that has a very complex logic in pre-insert and post-insert.
So it means that I need to create a REST api for registration (with all the complex pre-post logic).
BUT! the crud operation will not be arware for this complex logic in it, so I am creating some sort of a pit-fall when I cant re-use CRUD operation from the site and vice versa.
I am use to create single service that is suitable with admin CRUD and site operation, this way you wont have duplicate invocations, and each operation is aware to the permissions you have.
Thanks
Site is now in the process of complete rewrite. Their blog never was active enough.
BUT this project is very alive and very active. For all news you should check these resources:
GitHub repository - https://github.com/atk4/atk4. As you can see there are new commits almost every day.
Google groups for discusions - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/agile-toolkit-devel Same story - new posts every day.
IRC - #atk4 at freenode
Stackoverflow - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/atk4
YouTube - video tutorials
some more resources for addons etc.
You can use ATK4 for whatever type of site you want. I guess it better suits for admin (backoffice) side, but can be used equally well in frontend too. It's just - learning curve can sometimes be not so short. On the other hand - when you get used to ATK4 style of coding, then it definitely sucks you in :))
Update on Agile Toolkit as of 2017:
In order to keep the best parts of ATK4 framework alive, I have started 2 open-source projects following best practices:
https://github.com/atk4/data - Agile Data - Refactor for models
https://github.com/atk4/ui - Agile UI - Refactor for UI
Additional resources (forum, blog, etc) can be found at http://agiletookit.org/.
I have only very basic experience with HTML/CSS and have quite a bit of experience with testing software and web apps from a consumer perspective. I'd love to launch a web application that plays nicely with Google services, similar to some of the apps you'd find on the Google Apps Marketplace, such as ManyMoon, time to note, Socialwok, etc. I'm a huge Google fan and would like to build something that's well integrated with other Google services.
If you were a total beginner and wanted to build a complex app like one of examples above (project management, CRM, etc), where would you start?
If you worked your ass off 18 hours a day, 24/7, how fast could you do it?
I've dabbled into various languages and development frameworks, and read about which apps are using what languages but it's hard to figure out what would be most beneficial to jump into. Ruby on Rails, PHP, Google Web Toolkit, AppEngine. The list goes on and on. I want to be able to build and launch my own scalable web app.
Thanks.
One bit of advice: There is no shortcut for proper experience. It took me 4 years to come to a point where I can build enterprise level web apps - even though I had the dream of building one immediately, right from the beginning. Start small and build your way up.
Even though I did hate this advice when I was receiving it... Don't try to build the next Facebook platform right now.
Now, to answer your question:
Skills:
You must be absolutely clear about server-client interaction with respect to HTTP. You will never understand AJAX fully without understanding HTTP and behind the scenes of browsers. Note: being clear and knowing everything are two different things. Be clear about HTTP.
Learn about HTML/CSS and JavaScript standards to some extent to know that they bahave differently in different browsers. In the grand scheme of things, they are not that important if you are okay with some framework that handles these for you (I recommend JQuery and JQuery UI).
Learn a little about Linux, Apache, PHP.
How to go about it:
To develop web-apps, you could start with the LAMP stack - Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP.
First build a small web app that does something trivial - like saving and retrieving user's stuff using AJAX and a nice UI or something. I'd recommend jQuery and jQueryUI for JavaScript and UI frameworks.
Then, build a small web app that just gets data from some Google service, given a user's credentials.. I am not Google expert but I guess Google provides APIs for some services(?).
Then build an app where two people can share their data coming from a Google's service or something to that effect.
Then add your own fancy stuff.
It goes on like that.
If you are a .Net person, you could go with.. Windows + IIS + MS SQL Server + ASP.Net3.5/VB/C#. Guess what? StackOverflow is build on that stack :)
Learning about and using an MVC framework is also a good idea - ASP.Net MVC or something similar for PHP.
Minor clarification - By Google-friendly did you mean SEO-friendly? If so, Google-friendly and web-app don't go well together.
It makes sense to build a Google-friendly website not a web-app.
I would start by
brainstorming a hands-on project
identify the skills you will need to achieve it
learn them as you work through the project
set progress goals and celebrate small victories
For most people 18 hrs/day 24/7 sounds a little overly optimistic. A reasonable goal would be to form an interesting project idea and research the needed skills the first week, work through a few tutorials and maybe apply your own functionality the second week, build something 'complete' the third week, then take a step back and take another look at your original goal.
As far as choosing a project, I find a notepad helps. I'll be somewhere and think, 'wouldn't it be nice if...' and I'll go look for a solution that provides that 'what if' and find it doesn't exist. So there you go.
I would also have a look to one of the top voted questions here on Stack Overflow:
What should a developer know before building a public web site.
After 9 month developing an enterprise application using MVC + JQuery our Management and stockholders interesting to convert and switch to silverlight! they think it's more powerful than Ajax, make development speed faster than our current solution, It's Windows and Web and less headache.
Unfortunately, our stockholders dos not know anything about web and stateless state of web application and they always compare with window applications.
But nobody in our team know anything about silverlight. I am not sure that is a good decision. I think we develop as fast as possible. we develop a great framework and code generator for fast develop.
Thanks and sorry for bad English.
Dumping what you have and going for a rebuild mid development is almost always a bad idea.
For a personal project, I did exactly this. It was originally built during the betas of asp.net MVC. I got the app to a stage where it was usable (actually I still use it daily), but it was nowhere near ready for the outside world. And this was the problem; it was going to take an enormous amount of work so that other people could use it...
When Silverlight 3 was announced, I literally grabbed the backend of the app - stuck RIA services in between and had a few screens up and running that day without any prior SL knowledge. I probably could have kept going down this path but something clicked when I started to realise the power of silverlight. The goal posts for my app moved, and I began a SL specific rewrite.
Since then, I've started re-writing about 5 times over. I guess I'm still just learning how to best build an app in SL, having spent the last 12 years or so of my career working on stateless web apps, there was a big mental shift involved.
I'm a much better web developer then I am a silverlight developer, but if it was for a real project (rather then a pet side project) - it would have been shipped and out the door by now.
I'm convinced that SL is the ideal platform for most web applications (as long as it being a plugin isn't going to be any issue).
With that said, shipping is still the most important thing. SL is great, but the learning curve is steep. If you guys are anywhere near completing the app, I'd insist you forge on with mvc and maybe get someone to build a SL branch.
Re-platform an application is always costly, although if you've got your MVC right it should theoretically be easier to replace the "VIEW" part of the application with something else.
As to whether Silverlight offers you more than HTML / JavaScript is down to what you're using it for. If what you are doing is media-related or highly graphical, Silverlight might be a good choice. If your application is like most business apps (i.e. some input fields backed by some read / write to database) Silverlight doesn't really offer any tangible time saving for this kind of operation.
If the web application is public and you care about search engine indexing, semantic HTML offers the best possible option.
First I'd like to make it clear, I'm not looking for a "my tech is better than yours" type of post; this is a real case scenario and I have been faced with this decision. With this in mind, let me explain:
We have a WinForms application. It started in the early .NET 1.0 but the first shipping version was using .NET 1.1. There are layers (like BusinessLayer.dll, Datalayer.dll, Framework.DLL, etc.) but at some point during the "long" development cycle of this application, the "presentation" layer (Win Forms) got infected with some code, thus the "separation between the code and the presentation with code behind" is some sort of myth.
Bad practices or whatever, the truth is that the application is there and it works.
Years passed and we had .NET 2.0, we slowly migrated and it mostly worked, had to change a few calls here and there. Last version did the same thing, but for .NET 3.5sp1. We needed some sort of Webservices thing, and decided to use WCF instead. It works fine.
But despite all these .NET upgrades, most of the application's codebase is still the same old rock and roll from 5 years ago. We use Gentle.NET (old and unmaintained now) for our dataobjects (it was a blessing 5 years ago!).
Our presentation layer, the winforms, are "nice looking" since we employ 90% of completely gdi+ custom controls. (whenever possible without having to hack the WinAPi). The application is touch based (i.e.: it makes use of the Ink but it doesn't rely on that), but the buttons, labels, etc, everything is "designed" to be used with a tactile device. (TabletPC or Touchscreen). Of course some users use keyboard/mouse.
With all that in mind, and with all this web2.0 and Internet fuzz (plus Jeff's posts ;) ), we are considering the possibility of rewriting the application but using a web technology.
The idea is obviously bringing more availability for our customers (they can use the system whenever/wherever they want), and less maintenance (we can upgrade and it is an instant upgrade for 'em all), etc. You know, the usual Internet vs WinApp thingy.
The problem is that given that this is the healthcare industry, not all of our customers might be willing to "move" their databases to our server/s, which is acceptable, and would force us to install a webserver/database server in their own servers so they have their own copy. Not a big problem (except we would have to update those manually but that's not an issue, given that we've been updating win32 apps for 5 years now!).
Now, back to the main "question".
The team has little Asp.NET experience, we did program a lot in ASP 2.0 (in 1999/2000) but that was a spaghetti of HTML+VBScript+CSS, so I don't think it counts. After all that experience (the Internet bubble!) we went back to VB6 then C#.NET 1x and you know the rest of the story. We're a small team of C# developers for WinForms. We've acquired some Linq To SQL Experience in our last .NET 3.5 ride, and we liked it. We felt it very natural and very "if we would have had this five years ago…" like.
Given all this, rewriting the application is not a "simple task" (not even if we wanted to do it in the already known C#.NET), it would take time and planning, but we could correct dozens of mistakes and with 5 years of experience working with the application, we now can say that we have a better idea of how the customers would like to use the software and what limitations we created (by ourselves) when we designed the current app.
All that "knowledge" of the application and the way the business works, could be applied to produce a much better application in terms of design and code and usability. Remember in .NET 1.1 we didn't even have generics! ;) (you'll see lots of ArrayList's hanging around here).
As an additional note, we use Crystal Reports (and, as usual, we hate it). We don't think the ink control is a "must" either. The HTML/CSS could be shaped to look the way we want it, although we're aware that HTML is not WinForms (and hence some things cannot be reproduced).
Do you think that planning this in MVC (or WebForms) would be too crazy?
I like the MVC (ruby on rails like) idea (I've never programmed in ruby beyond the basics of the book), so no one in our team is an expert, but we can always learn and read. It mustn't be "rocket science", must it?
I know that this whole question might be a little bit subjective, but would you replace an aging Winforms application with a new ASP/MVC/XXX web application? Do you have experience or have tried (and had success or failed) ?
Any insight in helping use better decide what to do will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: Thanks to all who responded, we'll evaluate whether this is a good move or not, it sure is a hell of work, but I am afraid the the desktop app is getting older (using old net 1.1 hacks) and tho it has been more or less working without problems in Vista and W7, I'm afraid a future update may break it.
Also, lots of "more or less core" parts of the application are exposing some badly designed ideas and we had to hack here and there to accomplish certain tasks. Part inexperience, part lack of 100% knowledge of how the business worked (and Customers not sure what they wanted).
A new application (in any form) would allow us to create a better foundation while retaining all the user knowledge.
But, it's a L O T of work :) So we'll consider all these options here.
As some of you have mentioned, maybe a thinner client and some (ab)use of WCF here and there might be more appropriate.
Once again, thanks to all!
It would be best to ditch all your efforts of reusing the desktop application code when you recreate the web app. Following are the reasons:
Web apps especially asp.net use a different model. For starters note http is stateless. Each time the browser talks to server you have to explicitly send the current content of all the controls on the current page. You would not have used such a model in your Windows application.
To decrease load on the network you want to optimize the size of viewstate and how frequent you make http requests. Again your existing window app does not have any such provisions.
Updating view. You might have different event handlers, threads and what not in your windows application to update the GUI in different scenarios. All of that will need to be replaced. Javascript is a totally different animal.
Security. When using a browser your access to the local disk is highly limited whereas you will take the same for granted in windows application. If there is any code in the windows app that requires local resources, then that is going to be a trouble spot for you.
I would recommend the following:
Verify if your current application has any local disk access requirements (e.g. read/write to local file etc).
As you write the different http modules or handlers, you can try leveraging some of the backend/ business logic part of the existing windows application.
Give some thought to what part of your application can become a web service.
It sounds like the application needs a lot of refactoring to clean it up. If you want to move to a web model, and have maximum reuse you will really need to do that. Before you move to a web model I think you need to understand if it will be possible to replicate your user interface in that model. Is it your unique selling point from a customer perspective? You want decisions like this to be user driven rather than purely technical decisions.
It sounds like your application is the perfect candidate for a thick client application, rather than the lowest common denominator web model.
Some things to consider:
How will the web interface impact the Tablet interaction?
What new customers will having a web version bring you?
Will existing customers abandon your product?
Do you have access to consultants or outside resource with the right skills to mentor you in web technology? If you don't you can rely on StackOverflow or other web resources to help. You need some good mentoring and guidance on the ground with you.
What happens if you start this effort and it takes much longer than you expect? You know the app but don't sound like you know the web. Past experience shows that massive rewrites like this can end in disaster (it never sounds so difficult at the start)
Can you possibly write new features in a web-based version?
Could you move to ClickOnce deployment to make the application easier to deploy to customers. One of the benefits of the web is easier (zero) deployment. Can you get closer to that?
Would it be easier to migrate to WPF and create a browser application with that?
Silverlight or Flex might be better options for creating a rich experience, and may be more approachable for WinForms developers. Is this a possibility?
It seems like your app. is one of those that works best as a desktop app. Though you want your users to be able to access your app. using a browser.
I would suggest refactoring as much as possible so that the GUI gets cleaner and don't have "code".
When you've done this, start developing a asp.net mvc app but keep your desktop app. You should be able to use all layers except the UI layer, making it easier/faster/... Now that mvc exists, I'd say webforms is more about letting non-web devs do web. But you know web, sort of, and you want control so mvc is the way to go.