Parse.com+CakePHP+OAuth-2.0, anybody use them together? - cakephp

I've been looking for the best way to build a search web/ios/android application with user login and a REST Webservice. I have landed on CakePHP for the Website creation and REST api handling.
I would also use the RestKit API for iOS, and not sure for what RestAPI I'd use for Android.
I also want to be able to use OAuth-2.0 for communicating with Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest.
My Question:
Is there a way to use CakePHP and Parse.com together to handle all the user authentication, and would I need to separate data tables (one on parse.com and the other on another hosting service with CakePHP)?
I would like to keep everything at Parse.com if I could. Any help would be awesome!

I'm not familiar with CakePHP, but if you can completely ignore whatever DB/ORM comes with it by default, you can use Parse on your server and in client apps. There's an un-official PHP library you can use for the server, and they offer iOS and Android SDKs.

Related

Secure webapp with Django and React

I'm experimenting with these 2 technologies to make a secure web app [Currently learning React (60%) and Django (<50%). This is intended to be like a medical database, so doctors and nurses enters their patients' information. They need to login obviously. I wanted to implement React-based UI (And not using the classic method to create views from django), so I've found many tutorials just like this one:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/build-a-to-do-application-using-django-and-react
It basically turns Django into a restAPI, and then the React frontend uses axios to retrieve data from the endpoint. Sounds not bad at all (comparing to the native method of rendering data in a webpage from Django), but the problem is that I have no idea on how to make this secure, you know, Django provides an auth system, which is pretty good and secure, I have to say, but in a project with this structure, the auth needs to be done in React, so there many questions appear:
To start with, is it a good idea to make a project of this structure? (If no, then what could be a good one)
If it's a yes, how can I protect the API so only logged in users can interact with it? (What mechanisms to ensure protection)
Yes, this is absolutely a good idea to separate the client application and the backend server application.
You can access the backend through the rest api basically with any frontend framework/app/script.
Customers are able to extend their own applications with the abilities of your backend service.
You can create multiple different frontends that use the same backend or different parts of the same backend via the rest api (multi-branding, reselling). Or you can just swap the frontend framework every second year to a new one.
It's also easier to create different automations by using the rest api.
And the list goes on.
For django rest api auth I would recommend Token Authentication which is already included in the Django REST Framework and for React use this tutorial for implementing the login and the token handling.
And don't forget to use TLS on your servers, and create API documentation. (Example)

How to use API as backend in ionic mobile app development?

I am having a web application built using JAVA spring which has API feature to read and write into database.
Now i have to develop an ionic mobile app for the same application. How to read and write data into database.
I know Firebase and other alternatives can do the job.
But i need my own API code(written for web app) to be used. Is there any way to achieve that?
I guess calling the respective API when the web application is live is achievable.
But how can i achieve that while developing(When the web app is under construction)
Well depending on how you set up the API this could become quite difficult.
You're saying/guessing that you can call the API when the webapplication is live. This makes me assume you've created a REST API? Or did you create a Spring MVC application?
If the webapplication is directly linked to your Spring application (f.e. going to localhost:8080/my-profile shows a page (not JSON) of your profile) then I'm not sure if you can achieve the above mentioned target.
If you get a JSON response, or are somehow able to retrieve it from the webpage, you can just simply call (in typescript:)
this.http.get('http://localhost:8080/my-profile').map(response => console.log(response.json() );
Else, you probably will have to create a basic REST API (check out Spring boot for a 5 minute setup) and provide it, either with hardcoded data or connect it with your database.

How to make Ionic app work with an API written in Laravel but still works offline

I would like to ask how to create an ionic app that talks to Laravel API but still works offline when there's no connection.
Let's say i have to write a quiz mobile app in Ionic and it requests for Laravel API to retrieve the questions as well as store the scores in db.
I'm just starting to learn Ionic and i'm really confused right now on how to approach this.
What confuses me most are:
Does the Ionic source live inside the Laravel source code w/c serves the API?
If i want the Ionic app to be installable, should the Laravel source code be included as well during the compilation process?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Your php or in general server side code is completely independent from your ionic application. If you want your app to work offline you should think about something like fetching a high number of information initially and work with this data without making any additional requests.
However your ionic app does only contain the frontend. You could implement some logic for local storage, but if you want to keep information hidden from the user (e.g. solutions) you have to put that logic on a dedicated server.
In the few details you provided, I can say the Laravel code does not live inside the ionic app. The ionic app is separate from the backend API by Laravel. You are possibly trying for a ReST based architecture where you communicate with your Laravel Server with an API. You need to keep those codes separate.
However without any internet, you won't be able to access those APIs, so you will just be able to show some static data, or you could serve from a DB and show later. For how to use the sqlite db you can look here
In your backend you can have an API like
http://example.com/api/v1/questions/1/
Which will fetch a question with options and if you want the app to have the answer for offline storage you may have that as well. When a user answers, you may check whether you have internet access and send answer and verify if you do, else you may save the answer in your DB and sync when you do have access. You can fetch multiple questions so that a user may answer multiple questions in case he/she will not have internet access.
Hope it helps. :)

Is there any restful api for postgresql?

Im trying to develop a web app using angularjs, restangular and postgresql, im using ubuntu and xampp for development. I found ArrestDB, a restful api for postgresql. In its documentation,
# Get all rows from the "customers" table where the "country" field matches "Australia" (LIKE)
GET http://api.example.com/customers/country/Australia/
https://github.com/alixaxel/ArrestDB
While in restangular documentation,
// Just ONE GET to /accounts/123/buildings/456
Restangular.one('accounts', 123).one('buildings', 456).get()
https://github.com/mgonto/restangular
Do you guys know a free RESTful api for postgresql that works well with restangular?
ArrestDB interprets api/{Table}/{Field}/{....} while Restangular interprets api/{table}/{id}/{relations table}. I also tried api/{table}/{id}/{relations table} in ArrestDB but I get error 404.
I also found Postgrest in github but its in haskel, and i'm not familiar with haskel.
Thanks...
Postgrest seems to be a very viable choice. There is no knowledge of Haskell required to interact with it.
I have used PostgREST and recommend it. It is written in Haskell but requires no knowledge of Haskell (in the same way that pg is written in C, but no knowledge of C is required to use it). The documentation at postgrest.com is quite helpful and I've been able to get up to speed with it quickly. Best practices are to run pgREST through a reverse proxy (Apache, Nginx, etc.) to control web authentication and authorization. PostgreSQL will enforce permissions GRANTed to the configured pgREST user (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc.) on the DB served up by pgREST. There are a number of access control options listed in the pgREST documentation for switching user roles as requests come in, so the access control is pretty flexible in accommodating different usage scenarios.
You can use Express.js and Node.js to create RESTful API for example. It works with PostgreSQL well. I am using it now for my application, so I have a PostgreSQL DB, back-end in Express.js with pg-promise and Node.js and front-end in AngularJS with Restangular.
You can try
this tutorial,
this guy has a quite good blog about building API and other useful things.

Creating a web application that communicates with another web application seamlessly?

I am trying to develop a web application that can communicate with another web application. App1 is an app developed using Angular.js and Struts2. This apps sole purpose is to perform search queries on several databases and returning the information about the products for the user to view. App2, the current app I am developing, will be developed using Angular.js and Flask/Python. This app will be responsible for storing the products the user selects in a shopping cart and allowing the user to make a purchase.
I am stuck as to how to get the two applications to communicate(passing login information, selected items ids, etc.) with eachother.
I have tried passing information via a url redirect (http://www.example.com/?myVar=someData&...) but Angular is giving me a lot of trouble to try and get around that. Even if I can get this to work, I think it would be insecure as data the user shouldn't know will be exposed in the url.
My second thought would be to somehow access the session data from App1 in App2 but that could also lead to security issues.
My final thought would be to some how make a call to App1 that returns a json object that can be parsed in App2 but I am not entirely sure how to pass that information along.
How can I get the two applications to communicate with each other?
Thanks for your help
In my opinion this isn't really within the scope of AngularJS. However, I believe that the best, most accepted practice for communication between web applications in this day and age is RESTful Web Services.
It's not a small topic, but once you get the concept behind it you can use it in any programming language that supports web applications (Java which I'm assuming you're using because of struts has multiple REST libraries, I prefer Jersey but that's just me).
It's also an amazing way to use your Angular front end to talk with its own back end. The entire Angular $resource framework is built around the idea of using RESTful services.
Check out this link on Wikipedia for a brief synopsis of what makes a service RESTful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer#Applied_to_web_services
Now, that applies to most of what you asked. As far as login information is concerned, that's going to depend on your security implementation. A lot of times you can put information like that in the header of a web services request, and only accept requests that come from trusted servers, etc. but there's a good bit of stuff to understand there. It's an entirely separate topic.
Hopefully this helps you get started. Let me know if you'd like more information or pointers.

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