I have been playing with Rails 4 for last couple of months. Since I don't have any original ideas, I am practicing by building clones of famous sites like Stackoverflow, Twitter, Facebook, IMDB, Pinterest, Wordpress blog etc. I was thinking of building clone of Mint. Can somebody breakdown the steps required? If you could specify gems that could be best for it, that would be great.
Thanks.
The initial challenge is retrieving the data from your users' financial institutions. Unless you're just going to support a couple of banks, that will be a very large effort for one person to implement and maintain.
Yodlee has APIs to do just this for you. As a matter of fact, Mint used to use Yodlee. I found one gem for Yodlee's API but it doesn't look to be actively maintained. You can also check out David Lesches's five part series on Rails and Yodlee.
Once you've got the transactional data you'll have to categorize each transaction, which is the core of the value Mint brings. You'll have to look at the data you get back from Yodlee to figure out the best way to do this.
Related
I think I read all the documentation and I'm still confused on wether LB4 is ready for production use?
As I understand, it still misses Many-to-Many relationship and some OpenApi specs implementation. The documentation is very scarce so it left me very confused.
We are currently searching for good node REST solution and LB4 looks very promising with things like TS and dep. injection(more modular design), but it looks like we'll have to skip this one for now. Is anyone using this at all? I would be very glad to hear some experiences.
We have used it for one of our application. I agree that there are some gaps but for most of the stuff, you can handle it pretty well in loopback 4. The most significant reason for that is the awesome extensibility of LB4. That's the reason why we could do authentication, authorization, bpm integration, etc. in our application by creating Components in LB4.
After we were done with it, we thought about sharing our experience with open source world. So, we published a loopback 4 starter application which demonstrates a multi-tenant architecture, supports authentication via passport strategies (using loopback4-authentication extension we created), supports simple permission keys based authorization (using loopback4-authorization extension we created), soft delete entity (using loopback4-soft-delete extension we created) and DB revisioning, upgrades (using db-migrate package).
Hope it helps clear your doubts about loopback 4. Trust me, its an awesome framework with lots of futuristic goals.
Please excuse the noobiness of my question. I am mostly searching here for some directions and buzzwords to start digging from.
I spent some time developing an application in Python
Basically, it takes a bunch of images and creates a video out of it.
It i quite simple, and uses only a few libraries (opencv and nunmpy mostly).
I designed a small gui in gtk, but I think that it would be a good idea to offer the service over the web.
I think I could reuse some of my core and design a front end that people could access in their browser.
I only need a few data to get it running (images, an email)
The thing is my web dev skills are really close to 0, and I don't exactly know where to start from .
I don't plan on having hundreds of people a day on the platform.
People would connect, feed me with the data (link to a dropbox folder, google drive, whatever) and I would send them a message where it's finished.
If you could provide me with some names or links so that I could touch the field, I'd be really glad.
CGI is a fine option, but if you already have Python experience Django is definitely worth checking out (it falls in the category of rhooligan's #3 except it uses Python!). Django completely takes care of all of the database backend details for you, which is a benefit over simple CGI. It also provides easy-to-use pre-defined classes for handling file uploads, images, etc. It also has a great tutorial that will get you up and running. Just be careful about whether you're using version 1.3, 1.4, or the latest dev version, because some aspects of the framework have changed fairly quickly. Make sure that you're always looking at the right version of the docs.
Another handy service to keep in mind for doing something like image processing through a web app is a hosted cloud computing service provider like PiCloud. Unless you already have a private web server with lots of memory and processing power, these cloud services that charge by the ms are really cool. They also give you 1000s of cores which could allow you to do lot's of concurrent processing. They provide a nice Python API, and it has numpy and opencv pre-installed in both v2.6 and v2.7. (They use PyOpenCV, but you also have root access to install anything you want, so you can set up the "cv2" interface if that's what you're using--actually I just looked at your GitHub and it looks like you're using the old "cv" interface. You can also install any application you want on PiCloud--it doesn't have to be Python.)
You could start by looking into the Python CGI module and see if it will work for you. Then you'll need to do the following steps:
Decide on a webserver and install it, Apache is probably a good starting point.
Design the UI. Wireframe things out on paper paper. Figure out how you'd ideally want the users to go through your site and what you want on each page/view.
Your decision in #2 drives all the decisions from this point out. These days, most web applications are a combination of Web 1.0 and JSON/REST "services" (there's a couple of buzzwords for ya!). JQuery is a popular and widely used JavaScript library for developing the front end of your site. That would be another thing to look at. JQuery is completely independent from the back end and can be used with any type of back end (PHP, Ruby, Perl, .NET, etc)
We are using only portal part of the liferay to show data from some of our applications. It is done thro liferay-ext. Is it possible to rip out the modules unused by us like communities, forums, blogs etc that we dont use. These seem to be hogging tomcat memory.
Thanks
Rama
You can deactivate some portlets that you don't use from ext, it should be available in liferay's administration guide or developer guide on https://www.liferay.com/documentation. Depending on the amount of work you're prepared to put into this you might also want to think about dimensions of your caches and other settings. However, I consider an additional piece of memory to be a lot cheaper than investing the time (again on each update) to trim down Liferay, if it's only for memory reasons.
However, if you "easily" trim Liferay through some means, please provide your findings in the Liferay forums as well - it might be worth feeding it back.
Web services and web APIs have managed to increase the accessibility of the information stored and catalogued on the internet. They have also opened up a vast array of enterprise power functionality for smaller thin client applications.
By taping into these services developers can provide functionality that would have taken them months perhaps years to set up. They can combine them into single applications that make life generally easier for its users.
Whether displaying information about the music being played, finding items of interest in the locale of the user or just simply tweeting and blogging from the same application - the possibilities are growing everyday.
I want to know about the most interesting or useful services that are out there, especially ones that most of us may not have heard about yet. Do you maintain an API or service? or do you have a clever mash up that provides even more benefits than the originals?
YQL - Yahoo provide a tool that lets you query many different API's across the web, even for sites that don't provide an API as such.
From the site:
The Yahoo! Query Language is an
expressive SQL-like language that lets
you query, filter, and join data
across Web services.
...
With YQL, developers can access and
shape data across the Internet through
one simple language, eliminating the
need to learn how to call different
APIs.
The World Bank API is pretty cool. Google uses it in search results. My favourite implementations are the cartograms at worldmapper.
(source: worldmapper.org)
It's very niche, but I happen to think the OpenCongress API is amazing.
Less niche: Google Translate has an API which will guess the language of something. You'd be AMAZED how frequently this comes in handy (even though it's not as tweakable as you'd like and is not trained on small samples).
I was just about to have a stab at using the SoundCloud API
I know many people who already use for sharing their musical masterpieces and its a pretty good site. Hopefully the api will be as well!
I like the RESTful API for weather.com. It's free and very useful for the new age of location-aware apps: https://registration.weather.com/ursa/xmloap/step1
It does require registration, but they don't spam you or anything - it's just to provide you a key to use the API.
Ah yes - here's another one I've been meaning to check out but haven't tried yet
The BBC offer a bunch of apis/feeds that look very promising
http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data
They include apis for accessing schedule data for both TV and Radio listings along with all kinds of news searches. It even looks like they'll be offering some sort of geo-location service soon so it will be interesting to see what that has to offer
Another interesting one for liberal brits! ;)
The Guardian news paper have their own api
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
MuiscBrainz
Excellent service for music mashups.
Not so many knows that Last.FM initial database was scraped from this service.
The United States Postal Service offers a web service that does address standardization. Quite useful in reducing clutter and cleaning data before it gets put into your database.
Currently using SAS as measurement engine and Business Objects as display layer. Looking to develop a new, faster, slicker solution. Has anyone developed or purchased a campaign measurement reporting system? This solution should measure everything from email stats, web stats, customer activity, lift, ROI, etc.
Ok.. I'm researching and finding nada... We are working with a team from India and they want to re-write everything from scratch.. Any solutions out there at all?
If you are already using SAS, have you looked at their Marketing Automation software?
Update:
Just saw a press release from SAS about a new "Software as a Service" Campaign Management solution. Might be worth checking out for this.
When I was a consultant, we either rolled our own or used SAS (or a combination of the two).
Another vote for roll your own, it's mad that this area is so under served. The expense of building your own solution from the ground up, and the hassle of managing a remote team makes me think you may get further by integrating some existing tools.
Google Analytics for web usage has an API, there are many web log tools, you then need to bolt in the customer figures from your end of things.
I really doubt you could do much better than SAS in this area. Especially if you pick up some of thier specialist packages.
You could have a look at R which is a pretty slick open source statistics package. Unfortunately its not used very much for marketing; most of the examples and freely available code is geared towards biochemistry, genetics etc.