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I'm building an app that authors would (hopefully) use to help them, uh.. author things.
Think of it like a wiki but just for one person, but cooler. I wish to make it as accessible as possible to my (potential) adoring masses, and so I'm thinking about making it a web-app.
It certainly doesn't have to be, there is no integration with other sites, no social features. It involve typing information into forms however, so for rapid construction the web would probably be the best.
However, I don't really want to host it myself. I couldn't afford it for one, but it's mostly that people who use this may not want their data stored elsewhere. This is private information about what they are writing and I wouldn't expect them to trust me with it, and so I'm thinking about making it a thick-client app.
And therein lies the problem, how to make a application that focuses mainly on form data entry available easily to potential users (yay web apps) but also offline so they know they are in full control of their data (yay thick-client apps).
I see the following solutions:
Build it as a thick-client Java app and run a cutdown version on the net as an applet that people can play with before downloading the full thing.
Build it as a Flex app for online and an Air app for offline (same source different build scripts basically).
Build it as a standard web-app (HTML, JS etc) but have a downloadable version that somehow runs the site totally on their computer. It wouldn't touch the net at all.
Ignoring 1 and 2 (I'm looking into them separately), I think 3 would involve:
Packaging up an install that contains a tiny webserver that has my code on it, ready to run.
Remapping the DB from something like mySQL to something like SQLite.
Creating some kind of convience app that ran the server and opened your browser to the right location, possibly using something like Prism to hide the whole broswer thing.
So, have you ever done something like this before?
If so, what problems did you encounter?
Finally, is there another solution I haven't thought of?'
(also, Joyent Slingshot was a suggestion on another question, but it's RoR (which I have no experience in) and I'm 99% sure it doesn't run under linux, so It's not right for me.)
I think you should look at tiddlywiki for inspiration.
It's a wiki written in JavaScript entirely self-contained in a single html file. You load it into your browser as a file:/// URL, so there is no need for a server.
I use it as a personal wiki to keep notes on various subjects.
Google Gears is used to offer a few of the google apps offline (Google Reader, Gmail, Docs and more).
What is Google Gears?
Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create
web applications that can run offline.
Gears provides three key features:
A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML,
JavaScript, images, etc.) without
needing to contact a server
A database, to store and access data from within the browser
A worker thread pool, to make web applications more
responsive
by performing expensive operations in
the background
Gears is currently an early-access developers' release. It is not yet intended for use by real users in production applications at this time.
If you're a developer interested in using Gears with your application, visit the Gears Developer Page.
If you wish to install Gears on your computer, visit the Gears Home Page. Please note, however, that Gears is not yet intended for general use.
But as you read it's still in early stages.
There is an additional option, and that is to use the new HTML5 offline application features, namely the Application Cache, Client-Side Databases, and Local Storage APIs.
Currently I believe that Safari is the only shipping browser to support any of these, and i believe it only supports the client side databases and local storage parts. The webkit nightlies support all of these features, the firefox nightlies support many of them (maybe all now?)
[Edit (olliej): Correction, Firefox 3 supports the Application cache, but alas not the client side DB]
We are using something similar to your third option to test our websites locally. Works just fine.
Our packaged webserver is not small enough to accomplish what you need, but then again we've not been trying to keep it small either. If you can package your webserver code into a small enough package I don't see why this approach would'nt work.
I think AIR is the way to go..
Have you checked into google gears?
Some pointers for solution 3:
for the GUI part, ExtJS seems really nice.
for the storage part, there is a nice javascript library that abstracts different storage backends: PersistJS.
Supported backends for PersistJS:
flash: Flash 8 persistent storage.
gears: Google Gears-based persistent storage.
localstorage: HTML5 draft storage.
whatwg_db: HTML5 draft database storage.
globalstorage: HTML5 draft storage (old spec).
ie: Internet Explorer userdata behaviors.
cookie: Cookie-based persistent storage.
Also, I think the moin moin wiki software has a desktop version that includes its own webserver. This stuff is easy in python, since batteries are included.
You might want to check out how they do it?
You could make a dedicated client using Webkit or Firefox's backbone. Some games use that solution for UI for example.
Or you could make a little webserver (I have a little webserver in Lua that I use for similar purposes, just a few megas with libaries and all). However if you take this route the biggest issue to consider is you don't want your webserver to depend on environmental variables, you want it to be totally autonomous. You should try to isolate all variables t o a config file and be done with it (bundle style)
Or you could use a Java client application to display the webpage
Or GoogleGears, but that's the same (almost) as Flex+Air. so choose Flex+Air if that's what you are familiar with
You didn't specify a language but I looked at Karigell a few years ago. It's Python web framework, similar to Django or TurboGears, but it doesn't have the overhead of those frameworks.
From my messing around with it, it seems like it would work for your purposes. It has a built-in web server (though you can use pretty much any server you want) and you can use any database that Python supports.
Plus, Python works well with Linux. :)
If you made the app a regular web app heavily reliant on client-side technologies (using DHTML and the likes of Google Gears to store data offline as already suggested) so once opened, there wasn't much interaction with the server, you could probably host the thing on a basic shared hosting account which wouldn't cost that much. That might be your easiest starting point as you wouldn't have to worry about all the issues with desktop apps such as compatibility with different operating systems, packaging up an install etc, yet you wouldn't need massive server resources behind it either.
You can use HTML, JS and whatever else in Adobe AIR and you'll have plenty of options of saving data locally, too.
in java world you could use jetty for a server, implement web app using your favorite framework and use hsqldb as a database - it lives entirely in your container (jetty). you can deploy preview app on the web and package downloadable offline version.
There's a portable distribution of Apache/MySQL/PHP (to place on USB keys):
http://portableapps.com/apps/development/xampp
This should be easily adapted to your needs.
You could also consider using XULRunner or Prism
They're the opensource technology that FireFox, Thunderbird and Joost are built on, and allows you to develop apps in XML and javascript essentially against the same rich api that FireFox itself has. And of course this is cross platform too, so it'd work on Mac/Linux/Windows...
Check here for more info:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XULRunner
I was thinking of doing something like this myself. My plan was to write app using django and write script that starts django's testing server and opens default browser on specified port. My plan was to use SQLite...
Also, it would be nice to pack it into one package, so users without django installed can run app without any dependecies...
My suggestion, as you pointed above, is to use a Wiki system to solve your problem. Now the question could be: Wich one?
You can use Trac, it is very simple and you can customize its GUI. But, if you prefer something more advanced please use MoinMoin. I used it for years, and IMO it is a very good and strong wiki system.
Depiste wich wiki you will choose, forget to write your web-app from scratch. According to yor question the best approach is to pick something that works and customize/modify it to fit your needs.
Related
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 have a (AJAX heavy) web application hosted in cloud across servers and we need to monitor the availability of this service. Requires logging in to the application with a username-password, perform some searches as that user etc.
Since we plan to use Nagios for some other monitoring tasks, we decided to use Nagios for web application monitoring too.
I came across three such solutions:
Webinject: I don't feel like using this. Project not under active development. It was last released in Jan 2006. I can't see any support/help available. Also I suspect how will it behave with Ajax.
Cucumber-Nagios:
I tried using this. It involves many Ruby components and found that you have to have in-depth knowledge of Ruby platform to make all these components work together. I am not a Ruby guy and having tough time making all these components work together. Also even this project is not under active development and I don't see support/help options available. I posted a bug 4 days back and don't see any response yet.
Selenium plugin for Nagios: Haven't tried it yet. Will try now.
Any more solutions available?
Also, since I don't see any good actively developed solutions for monitoring web applications using Nagios, I suspect if it's really a good approach to use Nagios for this? If not, what alternatives do I have? In short what is the best approach to monitor web applications availability?
Edit 1: We can't afford the Nagios XI paid version and will prefer open source solutions.
If not, what alternatives do I have?
Although Nagios was one of options that we've considered, we've chosen OpenNMS for monitoring purposes. Rationale for our decision is that OpenNMS is highly reliable and configurable free open-source tool and additionally, most of our applications are Java-based; OpenNMS offers integration with JMX. However, bear in mind that if you're demanding very complex tests for your Web site maybe it's better to look elsewhere. OpenNMS can be set to check for HTTP status codes etc., but if you're looking for complex scenarios take a look at:
Apache JMeter (we're using it mainly during the testing phase)
Selenium (can be well used even in production phase)
is there someone who has expirience in hosting django applications on ep.io?
Waht are the pros/cons on it?
I'm currently using ep.io, I'm still in development with my app but I have an app deployed and running.
When you use a service like this you go into it knowing that it isn't going to be the perfect solution for every case. Knowing the pros and cons before hand will help set your expectations so that you aren't disappointed later on.
ep.io is still very young and I believe still in beta, and isn't available to the general public. To be totally fair to them, it is still a work in progress and some of these pros and cons may change as they roll out new features. I will try and come back and update this post as the new versions become available, and my experience with the service continues.
So far I am really pleased with what they have, they took the most annoying part of developing an application and made it better. If you have a simple blog app, it should be a breeze to deploy it, and probably not cost that much to host.
Pros:
Server Management: You don't have to worry about your server setup at all, it handles everything for you. With a VPS, you would need to worry about making sure the server is up to date with security patches, and all that fun stuff, with this, you don't worry about anything, they take care of all that for you.
deployment: It makes deploying an app and having it up and running really quickly. deploying a new version of an app is a piece of cake, I just need to run one maybe two commands, and it handles everything for me.
Pricing: you are only charged for what you use, so if you have a very low traffic website, it might not cost you anything at all.
Scaling: They handle scaling and load balancing for you out of the box, no need for you to worry about that. You still need to write your application so that it can scale efficiently, but if you do, they will handle the rest.
Background tasks: They have support for cronjobs as well as background workers using celery.
Customer support: I had a few questions, sent them an email, and had an answer really fast, they have been great, so much better then I would have expected. If you run your own VPS, you really don't have anyone to talk to, so this is a major plus.
Cons:
DB access: You don't have direct access to the database, you can get to the psql shell, but you can't connect an external client gui. This makes doing somethings a little more difficult or slow. But you can still use the django admin or fixtures to do a lot of things.
Limited services available: It currently only supports Postgresql and redis, so if you want to use MySQL, memcached, mongodb,etc you are out of luck.
low level c libs: You can't install any dependencies that you want, similar to google app engine, they have some of the common c libs installed already, and if you want something different that isn't already installed you will need to contact them to get it added. http://www.ep.io/docs/runtime/#python-libraries
email: You can't send or recieve email, which means you will need to depend on a 3rd party for that, which is probably good practice anyway, but it just means more money.
file system: You have a more limited file system available to you, and because of the distributed nature of the system you will need to be very careful when working from files. You can't (unless i missed it) connect to your account via (s)ftp to upload files, you will need to connect via the ep.io command line tool and either do an rsync or a push of a repo to get files up there.
Update: for more info see my blog post on my experiences with ep.io : http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/04/my-experiences-with-epio/
Update: Epio closed down on May 31st 2012
I've been looking at Rietveld as a solution for the lack of code reviews at my company. Can it be set up on a server in-house without using App Engine? It seems to have a bit of App Engine specific code, and I'm not sure it could be set up on a plain old Django/Apache install. I've looked around, but haven't found any information about this.
Check out http://django-gae2django.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/rietveld/README
The gae2django project lets GAE apps run against django instead of the GAE development environment.
That means you can run rietveld under django directly, using (by default) an SQLite backend. You can also use mysql or any other DB backend django supports.
That, plus a web server (e.g. Apache) with WSGI integration, makes a local rietveld install run nicely.
What about using one of these projects that provide the same backend services as GAE?
Typhoon AE
Appscale
There may be more, these are just the ones I know about off the top of my head.
A bit of App Engine specific code? It's supposed to be an example App Engine app, so yeah it's pretty well tied to it. But, you're right, it does use Django which could make it somewhat more feasible to port. I'll second #cope360 recommendation, but from the sounds of your question, it doesn't sound like you've done much with App Engine. If it's only used by a few people, try running it on the GAE SDK itself.
Beyond that, I'd think you could take most of the code in the "codereview" directory and build you're own Django/apache app from that.
Rather than fussing around with a port or other GAE emulation, I would consider using ReviewBoard.
Review Board is a powerful web-based
code review tool that offers
developers an easy way to handle code
reviews. It scales well from small
projects to large companies and offers
a variety of tools to take much of the
stress and time out of the code review
process.
For too long, code reviews have been
too much of a chore. This is largely
due to the lack of quality tools
available, leaving developers to
resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based
solutions.
We've seen a lot of time and energy
wasted doing code reviews both in open
source projects and at companies. In
both cases, code reviews were
typically done over e-mail. A
significant amount of time was spent
in forming review requests, switching
between the diff and the e-mail, and
trying to understand what parts of the
code the reviewer was referring to.
So in an effort to keep our sanity and
improve the process both in our open
source projects and at companies, we
wrote Review Board. We hope it will be
useful to your team too so you can
focus on what's important: writing
great products.
we need an online offline wiki type app that is basically a number of pages with documentation in, but that also would need to link to a number of files .. words docs/ pdfs/ ppts etc that are on a synched mapped drive on the users laptop..
could anyone suggest whether or not google gears would be a reasonable solution to this, i have just had a brief peruse on the gears documentation.. and its seems pretty cool/useful.
as in make a web wiki and gears it up.
the app would also need some way of holding the links to the actual files (docs/pdfs etc) but that should impact the gearsiness of it i imagine)
thanks...
sorry its late in the day so the question may not actually make any sense..
nat
Given that Google is publicly committed to supporting HTML 5 and it's very extensive offline application capabilities, I would personally choose that direction over Gears.
Neither Gears nor HTML 5 is going to give you any ability to read content off of the computer. Web browsers are intentionally sand-boxed to prevent that kind of activity.
Check out the remarkable capabilities of HTML 5, and then see how extensive support for it already is.
Gears is for allowing web pages to store local content and applications on a client computer for offline mode, not for allowing the web browser to peek out on the user's computer.
Gears is also deprecated in favor of HTML5 local storage and other developments.