Xcelsius: Retrieve data from Web service [closed] - web-services

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My company is considering buying Xcelsius to allow users the production of dashboards
I think the tool is quite powerful as far as the dashboard creation is concerned, many widgets, based on Excel which the users know well...
I was wondering how good the product was to retrieve data from a web service (WCF for instance) and if the generated SWF was able to update it once it has been published on a web server
Any feedback appreciated.
Thanks

I know it has been quite some time since you asked this question but here is my answer. The company that I work for uses Xcelsius to create dashboards from a web-service that serves up XML. There are properties in an Xcelsius project that allow the swf to re-query the web-service when parameters have been changed.
The only problem that we have had with the product is it is difficult (possibly impossible, we haven't figured it out) to use a web-service that has authentication. Xcelsius only hit's a URL for the web-service and as such cannot change the authentication headers if the web-service requires a username/password.

In the Web Service connection there is a tab for "Advanced". On this tab you can enter anything you want sent in the SOAP header... such as username & password. Xcelsius doesn't understand the idea of logging in, but putting the static text here will include it in the header and allow you to access data that requires authentication.

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Do I even need Django? [closed]

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I'm currently building a website where vendors from my city can authenticate and post their products, so users can search and buy them.
I started building the website with Django; in the meantime, I was taking a beautiful ReactJS 30+ hours online course and learning how much you can do with it: not only pure frontend, e.g. Routing, GET/POST requests, Forms and validation, Authentication. My initial idea was building the website with Django Rest (backend) AND React (frontend),.
But now I have a question:
Can I build my buy&sell website with React ONLY? (maybe using some pre-made backend networks like Firebase to save/fecth data to/from a database, to save time).
In your opinion would I need some backend functionalities which would be impossible/inconvenient to implement with React, Firebase or other services? Please consider that I'm talking about a quite standard buy and sell website with authenticated vendors and buyers.
Thank you very much for any advice.
While you don't need to use Django, you do need to use some backend framework to connect to your database or data store. So, to answer your main question directly, you probably need some other backend system to serve your data, manage authentication tokens, etc.
Django makes it pretty simple to wire up to a REST API (Django REST Framework is my preference, too), but you might be able to get everything you need done with NodeJS, and without Django.
Even still, you're looking at some type of backend, even with NodeJS and a simple NoSQL datastore.
I think you're on the path of least resistance by using Django, DRF, and React, and with a robust database like PostGreSQL.

Can you give me some clarification about the REST architecture? [closed]

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I am studying for a developer certification and I have some doubt related to the general concept of REST and REST Web Services.
From what I can understand REST is more related to software\network architecture style consisting of guidelines and best practices for creating scalable web services respect to a specific technology (differently from SOAP that is a specific implemented network protocol).
The first doubt is: "is REST related only to web services implementation or can be related also to other purposes? If it could be related to other purposes what are?
So from what I can understand using this REST style the messagges are send and receive directly using the HTTP protocol without using an intermediate protocol as SOAP.
I know that REST is statless (does not maintain information about previous states) so if I use the REST style I can't use the Http Session or coockies to mantain informations about what happens before. If it is true, why? what is the benefit of a statles managment? What is the difference with SOAP? Is SOAP statefull? (it seems to me not but I can say wrong things).
Using REST style the resources are modelled as noun, for example:
http://mybank.com/banking/accounts/123456789
And then I can perform a limited set of operations on these resources, operations described by: GET, PUT, POST, DELETE
Reading on the course documentation it say that these operations are the default operation in case of the architecture works over Http protocol. So are these operations the only operations that I can perform or can be used others? Can you explain me this thing?
Maybe I have a big gap in the Http protocol knowledge, I only know that Http protocol only supports the POST and GET operations. So what exatly are these PUT and DELETE operations? Are Http protocol specific operations as GET and POST? What is the difference between PUT and POST? and why REST architecture use PUT instead POST?
Tnx
REST describes guidelines and best practices to design an efficient architecture for the Web.
Can I suggest you to read these two posts? I think that they could help to answer deeply your questions about resources, operations, representations...
https://templth.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/designing-a-web-api/ - Designing a Web API (i.e. RESTful Web services)
https://templth.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/implementing-authentication-with-tokens-for-restful-applications/ - How to handle security for RESTful Web services
Yes, normally RESTful applications are stateless. This means that you should keep states on the server-side. In the case of security, you need to authenticate users at each request. That said, since Cookies are part of HTTP, you could leverage them within your application.
Hope it helps,
Thierry

How Django ORM, REST API and a Web app stack up? [closed]

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I'm trying to develop a web application in Django including a REST API and also a web application to allow user to login and see stuff. I'm a bit confused as to how these are connected together.
I'm thinking that Django ORM is at the bottom and on top of that comes the API and then the web app uses the API to generate HTML. Is this correct understanding? A yes or no with few {key}words explanation would be enough.
What is the best practice?
Basically Django ORM is the bottom layer in your app as it will make possible to manipulate your data. When it comes to APIs, the main goal is to make accessible and manipulable your data from different devices (clients), for instance your web app and your iOS app may consume the same API and that will reduce your implementation time and eventually it will give you a better integration through your different clients and devices. Last but not least, the Web app is at this point the consumer to your API and your front-end.
You could check Tastypie or Django REST framework/ in order to implement your API and for your web app you have plenty of frameworks that you could use as Backbone, AngularJS etc.

Best practices for custom http user-agent strings? [closed]

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I'm developing an application that communicates with an internal web service using HTTP.
Are there any "best practices" for custom user-agent strings so that I can put a nice one in my app? It's a Python library and the lower transport is Python's own httplib. Should the user-agent string say that or something else?
For internal use you can use anything really.
Of course, internal or external its always a good idea to include contact information, either web or email address, in case something breaks or application goes out of control.
Check this big list of user agents for inspiration: http://www.user-agents.org/
It is considered good practice to include at least an email address so people can contact you if your application is causing problems. This will also be your best chance of not getting blocked.
It's common to put a name and version number as well. Other than that it's mostly freestyle. user-agents.org has alot of examples.
Don't forget to honor robots.txt as well.
You can write in user-agent what you want! But if you beware of your application HTTP queries to this server may be blocked, set user-agent to common browser (like Firefox on Gecko engine) then server admin don't know what application reads her page and in server logs don't see your application.

Hosted CRM system with an API? [closed]

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I apologize if this is slightly off-topic.
I'm hoping to find a software-as-a-service CRM system that can be easily integrated with our custom user management application. Fundamentally, we have user our own accounts and provide services to these registered users; frequently, we have email conversations with people that own these accounts - it would be great if our CRM interface would suddenly light up with the record of these conversations.
Here's my dream solution, let me know if this is possible:
- We have a "service" email alias; i'd want to add the "track#GreatCrmVendor.com" to that alias so that all emails are CC'd to our CRM vendor.
- In the admin UI for our app, I'd love to have access to the emails that the CRM vendor has captured for us - something like a REST-based web service call that aks "give me all email headers for customer with email X".
Do you know of such CRM vendor?
Clarification: I know how to build such a catch-all email account, parse the emails, record them in the database and all... I just don't want to invest the development time in it, I'm hoping we can just integrate with a good off-the-shelf solution.
Thanks!
Salesforce.com has an extensive SOAP API for what I understand.
http://www.salesforce.com/developer/
http://www.advancedsps.com/?gclid=CPnlpuXL95UCFQRfagodDR554w
Try this:link text
It plays well with email - AND has an API if you want to do integration...
The links to info on email integration is on the above page, as well as developer API's
<< DISCLAIMER: not employed by them, just a happy customer >>
There are several apps in the Salesforce AppExchange that claim to handle this:
http://sites.force.com/appexchange/apex/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016YR4EAM
http://sites.force.com/appexchange/apex/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016Y7nEAE
The salesforce.com API is also pretty straightforward to use.
Sugar CRM has an API, and they offer a hosted service.
See: http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.php?title=SOAP_Documentation