Recently I've been assigned a task to develop a web app to plan leaves at our company. The main functionality is selecting days that given employee wants to reserve and then accepting/declining by those dates by his manager. Also, employees will be paired, so one of pair has to always be at work.
I have zero experience in developing web applications, so I need some help. Do you have any tips? Or maybe do you know of any existing project that are similar? I wanted to use Django, but any technology will do.
Thanks for your help!
Related
actually I am working with PDI 8.2, however I am able to upgrade to 9.0.
The main issue is that a customer wants to pull data from salesforce which works well so far. But he is using the Enterprise Web Services API with version 48.0, latest Pentaho supports v47.0 only.
I strongly assume that reading via v48.0 won't work with PDI so that I have to build a workaround. Could anyone point me to a feasible solution? To be honest, I don't even know whether the Enterprise or the Partner API is relevant for Pentaho. Have got my own SF-Account so that I could try around with the APIs.
Is the "Web Services lookup" the right step for the workaround?
Any answer would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Oh man, what a crazy question, all over the place.
I strongly assume that reading via v48.0 won't work
You'd have to try it but it should work. Salesforce has 3 releases a year and that's when they upgrade API versions. We're in Spring'20 now, it's v.48. That doesn't mean anything below is deprecated. You should have no problems calling with any API version >= 20. From what I remember their master service agreement states that API version released will stay up at least 3 years. Well, v.20 is 9 years old and still going strong...
Check for example https://baa.my.salesforce.com/services/data/ (if your client has "My Domain" enabled you can use that too instead of some unknown company), you should see a list similar to this: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/dome_versions.htm (no login required, that'd be a chicken & egg situation. You need to choose API version you want when making the login call).
So... what does your integration do. I assume it reads or writes to SF tables (objects), pretty basic stuff. In that sense the 47 vs 48 won't matter much. You should still see Accounts, Contacts, custom objects... You won't see tables created specifically in v 48. Unless you must see something mentioned in Spring'20 release notes I wouldn't worry too much.
If your client wrote a specific class (service) to present you with data and it's written in v.48 it might not be visible when you login as v.47. But then they can just downgrade the version and all should be well. Such custom services are rarely usable by generic ETL tools anyway so it'd be a concern only if you do custom coding.
whether the Enterprise or the Partner API is relevant for Pentaho
Sounds like your ETL tool uses SOAP API. Salesforce offers 2 versions of the WSDL file with service definitions.
"Partner" is generic, all SF orgs in the world produce same WSDL file. It doesn't contain any concrete info about tables, columns, custom services written on top of vanilla salesforce. But it does contain info how to call login() or run a "describe" that gives you all tables your user can see, what are their names, what are columns, data types... So you learn stuff at runtime. "Partner" is great when you're building a generic reusable app that can connect to any SF or you want to be dynamic (some backup tool that learns columns every day and can handle changes without problems. Or there's a "connection wizard" where you specify which tables, which columns, what mapping... new field comes in - just rerun the wizard).
"Enterprise" will be specific to this particular customer. It contains everything "Partner" has but will also have description of current state of database tables etc. So you don't have to call "describe", you already have everything on the plate. You can use this to "consume" the WSDL file, generate your Java/PHP/C# classes out of it and interact with them in your program like any other normal object instead of crafting XML messages.
The downside is that if new field or new table is added - you won't know if your program doesn't call "describes". You'd need to generate fresh WSDL and consume it again and recompile your program...
Picking right one really depends what you need to do. ETL tools I've met generally are fine with "partner".
Is the "Web Services lookup" the right step
No idea, I've used Informatica, Azure Data Factory, Jitterbit, Talend... but no idea about this Pentaho thing. Just try it. If you pull data straight from SF tables without invoking any custom code (you can think of SF custom services like pulling data from stored procedures) - API version shouldn't matter that much. If you go < 41.0 I believe you won't see Individual object for example but I doubt you need to be on so much cutting edge.
I have a Coldfusion application, developed without any framework and almost no architecture.
I'd like slowly migrate some part of the application to some kind of java based web application framework.
The original application must still be the main application all the way until the end of the migration.
The application has user and sessions and a lot of functionalities, not easy to decouple.
I'm looking for different ideas.
For example I could try to develop a REST API backe nd and start to use it from the ColdFusion application until I'll have Coldfusion only as front end. This process must go hand by hand with database refactoring and migrations, ie. new API must use its own database, so I guess that decoupling of database will be necessary (and probably database synchronization issues will arise)
But I would like to switch also to a different front end technology.
The situation would be like: Users login in coldfusion, enter main dashboard in Coldfusion and next "some" functionalities will be handled by another framework. That means a template engine is able to understand the user, his roles, his permissions, reproduce the same graphical layout, but it should serve the content with another technology.
Final result must be that all functionalities are migrated to the new technology.
I mention Java as it is in some way related to ColdFusion, but any web application framework could be used in principle.
I also think that Coldfusion is used in the original application is not relevant. The fact that no framework is used, probably gives me more flexibility.
Any architectural suggestion is welcome.
I recently did this very thing. A spaghetti code app developed by a graphic designer with a CFML book, a MSSQL database so denormalized not even Bizarro could have wrestled it and won.
What we did was we left the old app in place, built a new one and tested it extensively, perfected it, made sure it was capable of evolving (and it has). Then we flipped a DNS switch and sent out an announcement that the new system is the only option going forward.
I then built an archive feature that provided read-only access to the mess that we left behind. Some day, if the app owners want to migrate that data, we can try that (it won't go well), but generally the vast improvements have convinced everyone that the old stuff is only needed in that read-only mode.
Obviously that means reporting only goes back to the first day of the new tool, but it was either that (with a 4 week dev time) or they get it all and it takes 8 months doing what you described.
It's worked very well for us, and it's probably been the best-received work I've done here.
This is just a general question, but I'm wondering if there's an existing API that displays the current price for an item on Amazon? As in, if the price changes, the site will reflect that change as well.
If not, would building a web crawler to go through and find the Amazon items of my choice be the best way to build my own version of this? If so, what language would you recommend to begin this sort of project.
I'm not sure if I should have actually asked this in SuperUser but I appreciate the input. Thanks guys!
There are plenty of web crawling services for this task.
https://import.io/
https://www.kimonolabs.com/
http://www.diffbot.com/
If you want to make your own, I recommend node.js because it's asynchronous behavior.
I need to design and implement a Java web application that can be used by multiple users at the same time. The data that is handled by this application is going to be huge and may take about 5 minutes for a page to display the results(database records).
I had designed this application using HTML, Servlets and JSP. But when two users would try to get the records, only one user was able to view the results while the other faced an error.
I always thought a web application would take care of handling multiple users but this is not the case.
Any insights on this would be highly appreciated.
Thanks.
I always thought a web application would take care of handling multiple users but this is not the case.
They do if they're written correctly. Obviously yours is not. That's all we can tell you unless you give more information, most importantly details of the error shown to the second user.
One possibility is that everything is OK on the web layer but your DB access for the first user causes an exclusive lock so that the second user cannot access the data at the same time. This could be fixed by using non-exclusive read locks. How to do that depends mainly on what DB you're using.
Getting concurrency right requires you to choose the correct tools and use them correctly. It doesn't just happen magically because it's a web app.
What are are using to develop this web-application? If you are developing it in your own way from the start I must say you are trying to re-invent the same wheel which has been already created and enhanced by very solid frameworks.
I suggest you analyze your requirements thoroughly and study some available frameworks. Let them handle the things like multi threading and other aspects in the best possible manner.
Handling multiple request at a time is a container work and as an application developer we have to concentrate how we are handling and processing those requret being forwarded by the container.
I must suggest you to get some insight how web-application work and how request -response cycle happens
I need to be able to access a mySQL database from my iPhone, for both read and write ops. Instead of using MCPKit (due to security and speed considerations), I'd like to access the db through a separate service. The app is iPhone SDK, so I need to get data back in XML form, not as a web page.
I am trying to decide whether to write a Java web service (SOAP) to provide this link, or to just throw together a PHP script on the server side. I can create either solution, but I don't know enough to figure out the advantages/disadvantages of the choice. Please help; thank you!
If you're writing both the client and the server, and performance isn't a significant issue, then the primary remaining consideration is development time.
So, what tools do you have at your disposal? Which platform will allow you to do this with the least amount of work? If it's a toss-up between the two, then pick the one you're most familiar with.