A good example of what I want is a chat system, where I send a message to someone and he can instantly see my message and vice versa.
So I want the best way to track if in the database there is a new answer for me if yes then show it with AJAX.
Example Websites:
Twitter
Friend Feed
You probably want to look at Comet, or one of the other push technologies
You could use AJAX, but if you have a limited audience or won't be going live for a while, you might want to look into HTML 5 Web Sockets (it's currently only supported by a few browsers). With it, you could open sockets to the browsers that want to chat. All messages will be relayed over the Web server, so the chatters won't be able to find out the IP address of another participant.
I've been looking for the answer to this question for ages. Thank you Steve. After some research I found http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/rg28/ who seems to do the trick
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Apologies for posting a basic question and not a detailed programming problem! Alas, IBM send people here for BlueMix support.
We're evaluating different AI Bots, and with Watson what we want to do, I think, is use Alchemy to analyze our web site, and have a chat bot that can answer random questions using general knowledge as well as what Alchemy has learnt from our site.
But, I can't find an example of how to hook up Alchemy to a chat bot. Could any of you point me in the right direction? I'll try to come back with more difficult questions another day!
I think, is use Alchemy to analyze our web site, and have a chat bot that can answer random questions using general knowledge as well as what Alchemy has learnt from our site.
There is two ways to do this.
You can create a controller that sits in front of Alchemy API + Dialog. The user talks to the controller and it sends the information to Dialog. Dialog can then request a lookup to the controller. This option is only useful if you don't expect Dialog to be maintained at a later date (or you are using earlier versions of WEA).
The better option is to use the FUNCTION call within Dialog. This will allow you to talk to a third party system and get information back to work with.
Once you have your data returned, you can use your tags or keywords within the returned data to activate a particular process flow using SEARCH.
One thing to be aware of is that depending on the answer you need to determine how to present it.
If your corpus is stored as conversational, then you can use the content as-is. If it is stored from documentation, then you should have Dialog talk as if it is reviewing the content and coming back with an answer. The latter should be visible in a way that distinguishes it as separate from the conversation.
Thanks in advance for any help offered and patience for my current web-coding experience.
Background:
I'm currently attempting to develop an web based application for my family's business. There is a current version of this system I have developed in C#, however I want to get the system web-based and in the process learn cakephp and the MVC pattern.
Current problem:
I'm currently stuck in a controller that's supposed to take care of a PurchaseTicket. This ticket will have an associated customer, line items, totals etc. I've been trying to develop a basic 'add()' function to the controller however I'm having trouble with the following:
I'm creating a view with everything on it: a button for searching customer, a button to add line items, and a save button. Since I'm used to developing desktop applications, I'm thinking that I might be trying to transfer the same logic to web-based. Is this something that would be recommended or do'able?
I'm running into basic problems like 'searching customer'. From the New Ticket page I'm redirecting to the customer controller, searching and then putting result in session variable or posting it back, but as I continue my process with the rest of the required information, I'm ending up with a bit of "spaghetti" code. Should I do a multi part form? If I do I break the visual design of the application.
Right now I ended up instantiating my PurchaseTicket model and putting it in a session variable. I did this to save intermediate data however I'm not sure if instantiating a Model is conforming to cakephp standards or MVC pattern.
I apologize for the length, this is my first post as a member.
Thanks!
Welcome to Stack Overflow!
So it sounds like there's a few questions, all with pretty open-ended answers. I don't know if this will end up an answer as such, but it's more information than I could put in a comment, so here I go:
First and foremost, if you haven't already, I'd recommend doing the CakePHP Blog Tutorial to get familiar with Cake, before diving straight into a conversion of your existing desktop app.
Second, get familiar with CakePHP's bake console. It will save you a LOT of time if you use it to get started on the web version of your app.
I can't stress how important it is to get a decent grasp of MVC and CakePHP on a small project before trying to tackle something substantial.
Third, the UI for web apps is definitely different to desktop apps. In the case of CakePHP, nothing is 'running' permanently on the server. The entire CakePHP framework gets instantiated, and dies, with every single page request to the server. That can be a tricky concept when transitioning from desktop apps, where everything is stored in memory, and instances of objects can exist for as long as you want them to. With desktop apps, it's easier to have a user go and do another task (like searching for a customer), and then send the result back to the calling object, the instance of which will still exist. As you've found out, if you try and mimic this functionality in a web app by storing too much information in sessions, you'll quickly end up with spaghetti code.
You can use AJAX (google it if you don't already know about it) to update parts of a page only, and get a more streamlined UI, which it sounds like something you'll be needing to do. To get a general idea of the possibilities, you might want to take a look at Bamboo Invoice. It's not built with CakePHP, but it's built with CodeIgniter, which is another open source PHP MVC framework. It sounds like Bamboo Invoice has quite a few similar functionalities to what you're describing (an Invoice has line items, totals, a customer, etc), so it might help you to get an idea of how you should structure your interface - and if you want to dig into the source code, how you can achieve some of the things you want to do.
Bamboo Invoice uses Ajax to give the app a feel of 'one view with everything on it', which it sounds like you want.
Fourth, regarding the specific case of your Customer Search situation, storing stuff in a session variable probably isn't the way to go. You may well want to use an autocomplete field, which sends an Ajax request to server after each time a character is entered in the field, and displays the list list of suggestions / matching customers that the server sends back. See an example here: http://jqueryui.com/autocomplete/. Implementing an autocomplete isn't totally straight forward, but there should be plenty of examples and tutorials all over the web.
Lastly, I obviously don't know what your business does, but have you looked into existing software that might work for you, before building your own? There's a lot of great, flexible web-based solutions, at very reasonable prices, for a LOT of the common tasks that businesses have. There might be something that gives you great results for much less time and money than it costs to build your own solution.
Either way, good luck, and enjoy CakePHP!
I am developing a basic yet highly customized CRM for a small training centre which has the ability to store student records and also send emails to them. I'm using SwiftMailer following this excellent tutorial in CakePHP to accomplish the sending part.
Of course, students are sometimes going to reply to emails and I'd like to retrieve them within my CRM and store them along with the student record.
However, I cannot find a single reference to doing this. I've tried the following Google searches: "receiving email cakephp" , "retrieving email cakephp" and even "email client cakephp" but all of these queries give results relating to sending mail rather than receiving it -- very frustrating!
Finally, I broadened my search to non-cake solutions and found someone recommending a library called ezComponents. It doesn't seem to have had any active development for about a year, but it includes an email receiving class which is exactly what I want. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to add this to CakePHP and the only post I've been able to find on the entire web on the matter doesn't exactly go into much detail. It's certainly not a step-by-step tutorial on using ezComponents on CakePHP like the SwiftMailer tutorial I mentioned above.
I also found a class on Google Code called php-imap which looks like it would do the job but, again, I haven't the slightest clue how to get it working happily in Cake like SwiftMailer is.
I realize that I may have to learn how to package classes for use in Cake by myself but I'm asking this question first on the off-chance that there is already a Cake-friendly solution to this problem that I just haven't realized :-)
Joseph
Thanks to everyone for your answers, but I've been doing some more searching and it looks like the solution is actually incredibly simple.
Basically, with the help of a plugin, I can set up the mail server in databases.php as a datasource and then write a Model and Controller to interact with it.
Here's the example I found: https://github.com/kvz/cakephp-emails-plugin
Edit: the repo has been deprecated and is now available at https://github.com/kvz/deprecated/tree/cakephp-emails-plugin
You will want to pipe your email to PHP and use stdin:// to read the contents of the email and add the e-mail to your database.
I've done this with cake and the simplest way is to make a Cake console application to handle the parsing. Also using cpanel's account level filtering to generate the pipe is really simple.
http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/piping-mail-php-scripts-howto-checklist-50985.html
http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php
Sounds like you want to include SwiftMailer as a Cake plugin, amirite?
http://book.cakephp.org/view/1111/Plugins
-- if you want to package it yourself. Otherwise, a cursory search of the Bakery yielded this result:
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/sky_l3ppard/2009/11/07/updated-swiftmailer-4-xx-component-with-attachments-and-plugins
Hopefully it will at least get you pointed in the right direction. HTH. :)
Hey guys, I have a client who wants their front site to have a tracker on disaster weather like hurricanes when they occur. Essentially they want a way to manage this without getting a developer to do it everytime a new storm develops.
I know there are plenty of ways to get a weather updates on website when you have a set location.. thats easy. Its different when you dont know the storms in advance! Location would be different every time.
Does anyone have any idea on how to do this?
I would probably monitor an RSS feed.
TWC has some nice RSS feeds setup that look like they will facilitate your needs: http://www.weather.com/weather/rss/subscription/
The National Hurricane Center also has RSS feeds: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutrss.shtml
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What is the best way to programmatically send an SMS text message?
Are there any free Web Service based SMS gateways?
I know that if I happen to know the user's carrier (Sprint, AT&T, etc), I can send an SMS by emailing an address based on phone number + carrier. I would like a good solution that does not require me to know the carrier. Barring that, is there an easy way to lookup carrier given a cell phone number?
I understand that there are some services independent of the major mobile carriers that offer a per-message fee-based service, with API. What I would like to know is how such organizations tap into the SMS networks. Do they have contracts with mobile carriers to resell their services?
Use http://www.twilio.com/
They have a REST interface to send SMS's and even to establish phone calls or receive phone calls.
You even get 30$ credits to try it out.
Def. the cheapest solution you will find.
Where I work we've been using http://www.clickatell.com for sending out SMS - it looks like its about 6 or 7 cents a message. They just take http POST requests to send out a message. I don't know if you'll be able to find any good free gateways. We used to send out emails, but found they were unreliable.
I've used clickatell in the past and found them very good also.
However, You could build your own to get messages VERY cheap. All you need is: a contract which gives loads of (or unlimited) messages; windows mobile phone; and a bit of socket programming.
Write a web service (pass the number and the message) which makes a call to a program on the mobile which sends the message.
I know of at least FTSE100 company which went this route.
We got fed up with using 'free' sms gateways, very unreliable.
Now we use an sms gateway device called OutboxSMS from Felltech Ltd. It sits on our network and hooks directly into out mobile phone provider using a wireless link from it's built-in transmitter. We needed to buy a SIM card (we got a PAYG with a huge bundle of messages), which is fitted to the OutboxSMS unit. We configured an email account for it on our mail server (MS Exchange), and configured the SMTP/POP3 account on the box.
We use OPManager, this sends alerts by email, which we direct to outboxsms, it parses the message and sends a text message to our ops guys phones when something goes wrong.
We also have some shell scripts which use sendmail to send an email to outboxsms, which again is converted to text messages.
I think this one deserves a new answer. There's a new player in town, it's called Nexmo and features highly competitive prices, even compared to Twilio.
https://www.nexmo.com/
I have been doing that with a nokia phone, connected to a linux machine. I have a cron job and a script that would check a database table for new messages and use gnokii to send messages. It works great if the number of sms you are goig to send isn't to big.
You could also get a GSM transmitter and issue AT commands that send sms's. Don't know why you would want to do it this way, but it's another option. This way you won't depend on someone else service
I don't know of any free SMS services, you usually buy bulk sms'seses and use an API to send them out.
Whitepages.com has an API that will allow developers to reverse lookup a phone number. It reports the carrier on mobile number, however a lot of the time it's some non-existent-anymore carrier like Powertel or something.
Supporting Angus, I can vouch for http://www.clickatell.com. It was used at a company I used to work at. It was a very easy solution to setup and use and worked great. You just need to anticipate how many messages you intend to send out and bulk order messages. They're pretty cheap, overall.
I have used TextMagic. They have reasonable rates and a great API and account management.
Sorry, after re-reading your question i realized this is not the answer your looking for. However this is what i did for my command line program. There's a website where if you put in the telephone number it gives you the carrier. So when i entered my number it screen scraped the website, got the carrier and if the carrier is in my list, i retrieved the email of that carrier
Most companies offer a SMS-to-email kinda thing. For example myphonenumber#verizon.com or something (there's a whole list on wikipedia).
I used that to create my self a little command line application in c# that sends out text messages. However, you don't really get a "reply" and the number is a pre-assigned one from the company.
I think if you want to go the free route, this is your best bet.
Here's the wikipedia link:
SMS gateway