We're looking at adding charts to our webapp. I recommended using a 3rd-party service such as Google Charts; this idea was rejected over fears about client data being passed to Google.
Google's Privacy Policy (which appears to apply to Charts) seems to preclude the abuse of our data, since it states that they require opt-in to share it with anyone. Still, I'm not sure of this.
Is there a legitimate concern here with respect to privacy/security of the data we send to Google?
Is your web app to be used only by your company or also by your company's clients? If there are clients involved, then that would be a strong reason not to use Google Charts. After all, you can't take the decision to send your client's their data to Google, no matter what Google's Privacy Policy states.
My company has the same concerns, here are a couple of things that came up in the discussion:
Google has a good track record thus far in not unilaterally exposing customer data (unlike say, Facebook). Chances are they would not expose your data.
If you're really concerned about the exposure of data, you could always send the Google Charts API erroneous column and row data names, then rename the data to their correct names on the client side. So you could have columns Dept A, Dept B, Dept C, but you could send it to Google as X, Y, Z. That way, even if someone did see your data they'd have to spend a bunch of time making sense of it.
Use a client side library such as Flot (code.google.com/p/flot/). We'll probably use this option since we have some government customers who don't have access to the outside internet.
Related
I need to write an API which would provide access to data being served as HTML documents from a web server. I need for my users to be able to perform queries over the data.
Say on a web site there is a page which lists items and their owners. Then there is additional set of profile pages for owners which for each owner provide information about their reputation. An example query I may need to answer is "Give me ID's and owners of all items submitted in 2013 whose owners have reputation of at least 10".
Given a query to answer, I need to be able to screen scrape only the parts of the web site I need for answering the query at hand. And ideally cache the obtained information for future use with new queries.
I have no problem writing the screen scraping part, but I am struggling with designing the storage/query/cache part. Is there something about Clojure/Datomic that makes it an especially suitable technology choice for this kind of processing of data? I have been pointed in this direction before.
It seems a nice challenge but not sure about a few things: a) would you like to expose to your users a Datalog query box and so make them learn datalog-like syntax? b) what exact kind of results do you wish to cache, raw DB responses, html fomatted text, json ?
Anyway I suggest you to install and play a little bit with the Datomic console to get a grasp if you didn't before as it seems to me the more close idea to what you want to achieve atm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyuBnl0XQ6s http://blog.datomic.com/2013/10/datomic-console.html
For the API I suggest you to use http://clojure-liberator.github.io/liberator/ as it provides sane defaults to implement REST services and let you focus on your app behaviour
I have no other choice but to adopt iCloud right now. In the near future i would like to build my own cloud service. Is there any problem if the app transfers all the data from iCloud to my own cloud?
Only the data related to my app of course.
After user's permission.
Is Apple positive about this?
If you mean, would Apple approve an app for the store that was going to transfer the user's iCloud data to some other online service, as usual all we can do is try and gauge the odds.
None of Apple's guidelines even hint that apps may not use non-iCloud services.
Neither do they hint that there's any issue with moving data from one service to another, even if one of them is iCloud.
Apple does not look kindly on apps that transfer user data to online storage without the user's knowledge. Assuming you make it clear to users what you're doing, this is probably not an issue, but users should have the chance to opt out of your service.
Based on information available right now, what you suggest is probably OK so long as your app makes clear what's happening. It's unwise to try and predict Apple's app-approval actions too closely. They might change their policies tomorrow, or they might decide to reject your app for reasons that had not previously been stated. At the moment though, switching services like that seems likely to be accepted.
I'm looking for a United States Address Validation web service, as the title says. Also:
I don't need maps
I don't need Geo coding
I do need:
Validation that an address is real
Address parsing
Google's Maps / Bing Maps seemed good, but won't work for me because of these:
Prohibits use if not plotting points on a map image
Low request limits (100,000 / day) for premium account. I need more like 1,000,000 / day
Does Geocoding, which I don't need, which is resource intensive, which means it's slow
Any suggestions?
Maybe USPS?
https://www.usps.com/business/address-management-products.htm
use FedEx's API. They have an API to validate addresses.
Also:
https://webgis.usc.edu/Services/AddressValidation/Default.aspx
You can try Pitney Bowes “IdentifyAddress” Api available at - https://identify.pitneybowes.com/
The service analyses and compares the input addresses against the known address databases around the world to output a standardized detail. It corrects addresses, adds missing postal information and formats it using the format preferred by the applicable postal authority. I also uses additional address databases so it can provide enhanced detail, including address quality, type of address, transliteration (such as from Chinese Kanji to Latin characters) and whether an address is validated to the premise/house number, street, or city level of reference information.
You will find a lot of samples and sdk available on the site and i found it extremely easy to integrate.
You could, in theory, run desktop software and plug into any kind of API it provides, but then you become responsible for things like uptime, data updates, and associated overhead. You may also run into issues with the software threading model--is it multi-threaded or single-threaded software? You don't want to find that out in production.
There are a handful of web services out there that can verify US-based addresses, including the USPS official web service. The USPS one is very limited in the fields that it returns. For example, if you're looking for the "delivery point" which is used to make a full barcode, the USPS API doesn't return that information. I believe the USPS web service also limits the number of queries that you can perform, although I don't remember the exact limit.
A few things that you'll want to look for in a web service include the price (obviously) as well as geo-distribution of their servers. If a company has all of their servers in one location and that data center goes offline (which can and does happen), you're left out in the cold. If they have multiple physical locations, it can help to prevent unnecessary outages. Also, you'll want to make sure that the service call returns all necessary fields as per your requirements--like delivery point code, barcode, and DPV code (which tells you how deliverable an address is).
Lastly, you'll want to determine how you feel about interacting with the company. When you call them on the phone, are they responsive and concerned about your needs? Or are you talking to some front-line person that can't answer questions and is only able to gather information about your company size and revenue so they can evaluate how big of a fish you are and determine which salesman gets to call you back. Can you talk to the engineers that wrote the web service on the phone or via email?
There are a few choices out there and you'll have to choose the one that best fits your requirements and unique situation. Do a Google search to find a list of companies. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the co-founder of SmartyStreets. We have an address verification web service API called LiveAddress. You're more than welcome to contact me directly with questions on my personal Twitter account or the company Twitter account.
I need to make a dashboard application using data from http://www.projects.zoho.com
It is a project management site.
ZOHO provides data about projects by APIs available at http://www.zoho.com/projects/developers/projects-api.html
So can I use XCelsius engage to make my dashboard?
Is it feasible & advisable?
Also tell me if any other tool like XCelsius is more suitable for me....
expecting satisfactory answers....
This shouldn't be a problem as long as the results returned via XML aren't too complex. Unfortunately Xcelsius has a hard time dealing with nested XML tags of more than a few levels so it is best to ensure that you try to conform data to a table structure. Taking this into consideration depending on complexity you may or may not have to massage data received from ZOHO prior to loading it into Xcelsius.
You also need to be mindful of flash domain security practices if you are not already aware of them.
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.