I'm trying to develop AngularJS applicatino using the Angular tutorial web-server script.
Is it possible or smart to use it for development only scenario ?
I want to be able to develop and test my Angular application without relying on the real server and real database, that's the reason I'm asking this.
I don't know much about the tutorial web-server script.
When it comes to your situation, though, your best bet is to abstract away your data managing processes. In other words, you can make a set of services that take care of loading and saving your data. You could have methods like book.save() or book.fetch().
Then in save() and fetch() you can return or insert an object literal or call for a JSON file.
Assuming that your product will be running on JSON data, you should be able to write another set of model services that call JSON data from the server rather any that you've hard written in the code or in a *.json file.
Related
I'm a little new to GraphQL and this question falls under "It cannot possibly be this hard. I have to be missing something."
I have a fairly standard GraphQL/Apollo/React application split into client and server. Everything is working well with the client making API calls and getting data back from the server. The client is even able to upload files to the server. However, I now need the server to stream back files saved on disk. That's it.
This is the "I have to be missing something" part. Everything I've seen in the docs and on Stackoverflow is some variation of pushing the file back from the server and through the GraphQL query as a base64-endocded string and then doing some very hacky stuff on the client, often involving a hidden href tag and a simulated click. To this I say, "What???"
Seriously. There are files on disk that the server knows how to find. The client needs to show a button to the user that they can click on to download the file. That's it. Every other framework in every other language has an easy way to do this. Can someone show me the incredibly simple thing that I'm missing here?
Thanks,
Alex
What you're missing is that GraphQL really shouldn't be used for this purpose.
While GraphQL itself does not specify a specific format for serializing responses, the de facto format is JSON. And the only way to get the file inside a JSON response is if it's serialized as a string.
If you want to serve static content, you should set up Nginx, Apache or another web server that's been built with that in mind. Alternatively, if you're already using some existing web server library like Express, it most likely has tools for serving static content as well.
Just because you have a GraphQL endpoint does not necessarily mean it should be the only way your client communicates with your backend.
I'm transitioning towards more responsive front-end web apps and I have a question about model validation. Here's the set-up: the server has a standard REST API for inserting, updating, retrieving, etc. This could be written in Node or Java Spring, it doesn't matter. The front-end is written with something like Angular (or similar).
What I need is to figure out where to put the validation code. Here's the requirements:
All validation code should be written in one place only. Not both client and server. this implies that it should reside on the server, inside the REST API when persisting.
The front-end should be capable of understanding validation errors from the server and associating them to the particular field that caused the error. So if the field "username" is mandatory, the client can place an error next to that field saying "Username is mandatory".
It should be possible to validate correct variable types. So if we were expecting a number or a date and got a string instead, the error would be something like "'Yo' is not a correct date."
The error messages should be localized to the user's language.
Can anyone help me out? I need something simple and robust.
Thanks
When validating your input and it fails you can return a response in appropriate format (guessing you use JSON) to contain the error messages along with a proper HTTP error code.
Just working on a project with a Symfony backend, using FOSRestBundle to provide proper REST API. Using the form component of Symfony whenever there's a problem with the input a well structured JSON response is generated with error messages mapped to the fields or the top level if for example there's unexpected input.
After much research I found a solution using the Meteor.js platform. Since it's a pure javascript solution running on both the server and the client, you can define scripts once and have them run on both the client and the server.
From the official Meteor documentation:
Files outside the client, server and tests subdirectories are loaded on both the client and the server! That's the place for model definitions and other functions.
Wow. Defining models and validation scripts only once is pretty darn cool if you ask me. Also, there's no need to map between JSON and whatever server-side technology. Plus, no ORM mapping to get it in the DB. Nice!
Again, from the docs:
In Meteor, the client and server share the same database API. The same exact application code — like validators and computed properties — can often run in both places. But while code running on the server has direct access to the database, code running on the client does not. This distinction is the basis for Meteor's data security model.
Sounds good to me. Here's the last little gem:
Input validation: Meteor allows your methods and publish functions to take arguments of any JSON type. (In fact, Meteor's wire protocol supports EJSON, an extension of JSON which also supports other common types like dates and binary buffers.) JavaScript's dynamic typing means you don't need to declare precise types of every variable in your app, but it's usually helpful to ensure that the arguments that clients are passing to your methods and publish functions are of the type that you expect.
Anyway, sounds like I've found the a solution to the problem. If anyone else knows of a way to define validation once and have it run on both client and server please post an answer below, I'd love to hear it.
Thanks all.
To be strict, your last gate keeper of validation for any CRUD operations is of course on server-side. I do not know what is your concern that you should handle your validation on one end only(either server or client), but usually doing on both sides is better for both user experience and performance.
Say your username field is a mandatory field. This field can be easily handled in front-end side; before a user click submit and then been sent to the server and then get returned and shows the error code. You can save that round trip with a one liner code in front-end.
Of course, one may argue that from client-side the bad guys may manipulate the data and thus bypassing the front-end validation. That goes to my first point - your final gate keeper in validation should be on your server-side. That's why, data integrity is still the server's job. Make sure whatever that goes into your database is clean, dry and valid.
To answer you question, (biased opinion though) AngularJS is still a pretty awesome framework to let you do front-end validation, as well as providing a good way to do server-side error handling.
I am starting to work with angular and am fascinated by the bi-directional data-binding capabilities and by its $http method, which lets me save changes in to my mysql database, without refreshing the page.
Another thing I am currently fascinated by is the real time capability across multiple clients using firebase. Here all clients are updated in REAL TIME, when the database receives any changes. I'd probably like to use firebase, but I would have to drop Laravel and MySql as a persistence layer entirely, which I would like to keep for the moment, since my application is already working in Laravel, just not in real time.
How would I go about having a Real Time application, which updates every client, without refreshing the view, in Laravel using MySQL and Angular?
If I am not mistaken, Pusher and PubNub, are providing this necessary open connection with the server using websockets, so when the server has something to share, angular will now and render it.
Since I would like to use Laravel and MySQL as a persistence layer, I am not sure, what the best way would be. I am not even sure, if I understood everything correctly, which I wrote above, since I am new to angular and real-time applications.
What would be the next necessary steps, to get some Real-Time capability into a PHP/MySQL application?
The solution for your problem is:
1º - open websocket connection with the websocket-server and subscribe a channel, after this send the data to your serve using ajax
tutorial angular pusher
2º - In server side, you get the data, saves to your database and send a 'PUBLISH' to the respective channel into websocket server
lib useful for this
3º - Through the subscribe gets the data in real time
Pusher.subscribe('channel', 'event', function (item) {
// code
});
I had a similar problem recently and I finally ended up using Redis publish/subscribe Redis. You can store data in the channel and then subscribe to any changes. When something changes you can send it to Pusher which will send it then to the clients.
I also recommend considering Node.js and Socket.io since you can achieve very good performance without third party service, and even if you don't have experience with node you can find very good examples on Socket.IO how to write an application.
For Redis there is a good library for PHP called Predis and there is Redis Node client as well, so you can mix it all together.
I'm currently developing a mobile application that will fetch data from server by request (page load) or by notification received (e.g. GCM).
Currently I'm starting to think about how to build the backend for that app.
I thought about using PHP to handle the http requests to my database (mySQL) and to return the response as JSON. As I see it there are many ways to implement such server and would like to hear to hear thoughts about my ideas for implementations:
1. create a single php page that will receive an Enum/Query, execute and send the results.
2. create a php page for every query needs to be made.
Which of my implementations should I use? if none please suggest another. Thank you.
P.S, this server will only use as a fetcher for SQL and push notifications. if you have any suggestion past experience about how to perform it (framework, language, anything that comes to mind) I'd be happy to learn.
You can use PHP REST Data services framework https://github.com/chaturadilan/PHP-Data-Services
I am also looking for information about how to power a web and mobile application that has to get and save data on the server.
I've been working with a PHP framework such as Yii Framework, and I know that this framework, and others, have the possibility to create a API/Web service.
APIS can be SOAP or REST, you should read about the differences of both to see wich is best for mobile. I think the main and most important one is that for SOAP, you need a Soap Client library on the device you are trying to connect, but for REST you just make a http request to the url.
I have built a SOAP API with Yii, is quite easy, and I have use it to communicate between two websites, to get and put data in the same database.
As for your question regarding to use one file or multiple files for every request, in the case of SOAP built on Yii, you have to normally define all the functions available to the API on the server side in only one file(controller) and to connect to that webservice you end up doing:
$client=new SoapClient("url/of/webservice);
$result=$client->methodName($param1, $param2, etc..);
So basically what you get is that from your client, you can run any method defined on the server side with the parameters that you wish.
Assuming that you use to work program php in the "classic way" I suggest you should start learning a framework, there are many reasons to do it but in the end, it is because the code will result more clean and stable, for example:
You shouldn't be writing manual queries (sometimes yes), but you can use the framework's models to handle data validation and storage into the database.
Here are some links:
http://www.larryullman.com/series/learning-the-yii-framework/
http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/topics.webservice
http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/175/how-to-create-a-rest-api/
As I said, I am also looking to learn how to better power a mobile application, I know this can be achieved with a API, but I don't know if that is the only way.
create a single php page that will receive an Enum/Query, execute and send the results.
I created a single PHP file named api.php that does exactly this, the project is named PHP-CRUD-API. It is quite popular.
It should take care of the boring part of the job and provides a sort of a framework to get started.
Talking about frameworks: you can integrate the script in Laravel, Symfony or SlimPHP to name a few.
I am building a website (probably in Wordpress) which takes data from a number of different sources for display on various pages.
The sources:
A Twitter feed
A Flickr feed
A database on a remote server
A local database
From each source I will mainly retrieve
A short string, e.g. for Twitter, the Tweet, and from the local database the title of a blog page.
An associated image, if one exists
A link identifying the content at its source
My question is:
What is the best way to a) store the data and b) retrieve the data
My thinking is:
i) Write a script that is run every 2 or so minutes on a cron job
ii) the script retrieves data from all sources and stores it in the local database
iii) application code can then retrieve all data from the one source, the local database
This should make application code easier to manage - we only ever draw data from one source in application code - and that's the main appeal. But is it overkill for a relatively small site?
I would recommend putting the twitter feed and flickr feed in JavaScript. Both flickr and twitter have REST APIs. By putting it on the client you free up resources on your server, create less complexity, your users won't be waiting around for your server to fetch the data, and you can let twitter and flickr cache the data for you.
This assumes you know JavaScript. Once you get past JavaScript quirks, it's not a bad language. Give Jquery a try. JQuery Twitter plugin Flickery JQuery plugin. There are others, that's just the first results from Google.
As for your data on the local server and remote server, that will depend more on the data that is being fetched. I would go with whatever you can develop the fastest and gives acceptable results. If that means making a REST call from server to sever, then go for it. IF the remote server is slow to respond, I would go the AJAX REST API method.
And for the local database, you are going to have to write server side code for that, so I would do that inside the Wordpress "framework".
Hope that helps.