Standalone Instance, or Deployed War? - web-services

Why would you deploy a WAR onto a web server such as tomcat, as opposed to running it standalone?
Are there benefits as to deploying as a .war opposed to running the instance standalone?
I cant seem to find any reason why it's better to deploy a web app, then it is to run it stand alone.
Is war deployment just standard practice?
Does the size of user-base have anything to do with it?
Is it a per application basis?
Is it just admin preference?
The reason I am asking these questions is I have a webservice that I have the option to deploy my war file to tomcat, or to run it standalone. Is there a general practice on to why you would use one over the other? There seems to be little reason why, and more of just do.
I don't agree with the practice of "It's always been done this way..."
If anyone could shine some light on when to use one over the other, and why it's superior to do so, that would be appreciated.

Tomcat will take care of all the HTTP stuff for you. Things like HTTP request and response, sessions, and JSP. Maybe this will help - http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ.

If you only have one web site on one server then there is no difference... you could make that whole site a PowerPoint presentation and email it.

Related

Django REST and React implementation model

I am currently creating a website hosted by Django. I plan to use React as my frontend framework. I have done some research on putting them together but most say that I should go for the SPA model and have separate web servers for frontend and backend. The problem is that I wish to use apache as a prod server with django and avoid having 2 separate servers. I have read about the hybrid model and having django serve static files with react.
My Biggest concern is security as I have already setup apache for security and I aware that node.js is somewhat insecure.
What would the best approach be. The separate SPA model or the hybrid model.
I'd say it's okay to go for hybrid model if the project is small and you are the only one working on it and you only want to make things done. I think it's kinda messy to create apps like this unless they don't really worth the time.
But if it's a big project and more than one developer is working on it or will work on it then i highly recommend going with separate web servers one serving frontend app and one django app.
Also note that you don't really need 2 different servers. You can use one server for both and use 2 different which is still not necessary and you can use one web server to serve both.
And security not something that different models can cause to downgrade or upgrade. It's up to you to configure the server and write both frontend and backend apps secure enough to do the work for you.
There are more than one web servers that are as secure as they can be and they work with both django and react pretty well. I used nginx many times to host both django and react apps and i had no problem causing by nginx itself whatsoever.
And for last piece of advice if you will; Creating good quality apps requires a lot of time and energy, working with different technologies that do really good for what they are made for and if you are planning to be a really good developer you should come out of your comfort zone and adapt with new technologies that comes out and they are coming out pretty rapidly which requires you to learn constantly and do things in way you are not used to yet and making things work even if they doesn't seem to be good together at the first look.

Deploy Go/Golang REST Web API on production

I am writing a backend web api for a mobile app. It should support HTTPS. Most of my experience in .NET, but for this one I want to use Go/Golang. I have a sample service ready, now I need to make sure that it is production ready.
In .NET I will just use IIS, but I have no clue what would be a good approach for Go.
Should I have nginx as reverse proxy, or I better use FastCGI ? And how to make sure that my go app is up and will run on system reboot ? should I use upstart or something similar ?
I've been using Nginx FastCGI with a Go webservice - they work well together. It's no harder to set up than HTTP reverse proxying - except for having to learn how to do it. The performance ought in principle to be a lot better, but I have no measurements to justify that hunch. My web service can work in both HTTP mode and FastCGI mode (one or other at a time), so I suppose I ought to do some benchmarking (note to self!).
If you want proper system startup (and you should), you need to learn how init scripts work. I sometimes cheat and start with an existing working script someone else wrote for a similar application and customise it to work with mine.
I've used nginx as a reverse proxy for my Go projects. I've found that it's a lot easier to set up useful server settings such as TLS, compression, etc., in nginx rather than as a pure Go server.
Keeping it alive on server reboot is a more complicated question. I would suggest learning how to write a script/whatever for your server's init daemon and just doing it that way.

Run Django development server as public website

What are the risks of doing this? I understand the documentation says not to do it, but I have password protected all the pages.
The point is that your "password protection" is useless if a hacker can simply bypass that and read your database directly. We don't know if they can, but - as the docs say - the dev server has undergone no security testing whatsoever, so they might well be able to.
Plus, the server is single-threaded. It will only ever be able to serve one request at a time. That makes for a very slow experience for your users.
Seriously, there is no reason to do this. Setting up Apache + mod_wsgi, or whatever your preferred hosting environment is, is a five-minute process if you follow the very detailed instructions.
If you mean, you want to deploy your Django project, you should use something like NGINX etc.
If you just want to tell, what if a development server is public, you have the same risks with any another project written in any platform.

Best practices to update a live web service

I am always curious about how large-scale live web application updates are done. Since the application is live, that is why it complicates everything -you should not down your service and at the same time you should recover the activity/changes (in database etc.) made on your site to the new version during the update later on.
The first and most natural technique comes to the mind is that redirecting all the requests to some other replicated server, so that you can update original server without shutting-down your service.
I just wonder is there any other smarter techniques to handle updates in a live web service. Please, share your experience and opinions guys!
I am facing the same challenge myself.
What i did was to recreate the web page on another server [lets name it Test server] (with a different domain of course), import the scripts/database from live server and adjust them on the new domain.
Now I am experimenting on the Test server and after i make sure that everything is working OK, i am pushing the changes to the live server.
Unfortunately, i dont know if this is the correct way to do this. You have to be careful but it works.

Building web services without a web server

OK, this is impossible, but I will try to explain the situation here.
Let's say we have cases, that we need a fast setup of a web server in order to have a simple soap web service running (querying a db and so on).
In VS though, upon debugging a web project, it creates a quick ASP.NET development server without relying on the actuall IIS that might be installed on the PC.
Is there any project that does something like that?
This would be ideal for small projects, where a simple executable would get a server ready to go and would allow web services to be executed right away.
I have looked at some stuff over the net like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163879.aspx and http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2004/05/24/4479.aspx but they seem to be quite outdated and i am not sure how well they work (havent tested them thoroughly)
EDIT: I have build an application like the one you suggest. However, how can i implement HTTP GET/POST requests to the service using this method? I tried using WebGet after my operationcontract but it didnt work. For example, my service is at http://localhost:8080/Service and i would like to use it such as http://localhost:8080/Service/getMethod?x=2.
I believe that the development server used by Visual Studio is based off of the Cassini code base (of which there is a fork here). I also found this article on hosting the asp.net runtime. It was also created a while back (2004), but has been updated since (2008). I think a lot of the core concepts are probably still the same.
Another approach would be a roll-your-own web server using the HttpListener class. This could take some work if you want to use it for hosting asmx type services, but if you were doing RESTful services, it isn't too bad of an option (this is actually how RavenDB works if you are not hosting it under IIS).
A WCF service can be hosted in almost any kind of application, including a Windows Service or a console application. There is no need for a web server at all.
Alright,
i've done it so im posting it here to help anyone who has issues with similar problems.
Create your WCF Service file as usual and then by using ServiceHost (or WebServiceHost) you can easily create a WCF service.
In order to use GET http requests to make it simple to communicate with mobile devices (such as iphone) you can use WebGet above your service methods and make sure you manually add a service endpoint using WebHttpBinding for WebServiceHost or WebHttpBinding with an WebHttpBehavior for ServiceHost.
Then you can call your service methods such as http://localhost:port/webhttpendpointaddress/mymethod?x=2.