A few days ago I decided to make my own "interface" to make it easier to organize (and work with) some of my personal files. You know when a lot of related data, pictures and links are right in front of you and you can change them in a couple of clicks, this is very convenient.
I started by studying HTML, CSS and JS, because I thought that the changes made to the local page would be saved somewhere on my PC so I can just run Index.html and do whatever I want. But they didn't. Refreshing the page erased all changes.
Using browser localstorage does not suit me, because if I change the browser, the data will be lost. I wanted it to just open with Index.html and work fine even if I change my browser or move the site folder to another computer.
Then I decided to learn more about server-side languages (such as PHP or Node.js) because they are directly related to databases, so I was hoping to save changes through them. But these languages required me to really open the server, with ip and port tracking. And I just wanted to open a local page through one file, without any ports or connections via the console. So this method scared me off quickly.
So is there an easy way to make a local page like this? Maybe I have not studied well one of the above methods and it has this opportunity?
Or the best I can hope for is a simple application that will use that local page as an interface to interact with data? I accidentally heard about this possibility a long time ago. Then I will ask you to give at least a hint as to which language to choose for this.
I don't understand well everything that lies outside of vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, so a complete study of a complex language like Java or Python will be too difficult for me, and the goal is not worth such a lot of effort.
I hope I understand correcly what you are trying to do.
If your goal is to make an application to manage your files, I think the simplest solution will be, as you said, to look into NodeJS and the File system api which will let you interact with your files through javascript code.
Your program will have to be in two part that will have to interact:
the "front" html page
the "back" nodejs script
The downside is that you'll have to go deeper into your study of the language to learn how to create the interactions you want between your html file and your NodeJS application.
However, there is no need to open your server to the web to make it work. The NodeJS application can be set to listen to requests from only the computer that runs it (localhost).
I obviously can't get too much into details without knowing precisely what you want to do but you'll probably have to learn to make a local server with node (search "nodejs http" or "nodejs express"), then make requests to it via the html page's scripts (search "ajax request").
What you need to look into are (web based) content management systems. like strapi or "grand old dame" WordPress.
Related
I've been reading about Node.js hoping to expand my web development skills.
Now I don't quite understand how I will use it to develop my own mini-project, what I'm trying to achieve is to have, say, a html webpage (www.example.com/routine/video.php) that will display a series of videos.
I would like to then have another html webpage say(www.example.com/routine/controller.php) that will have a button that will pause/unpause the video thats currently playing on video.php. (why do I need another html page?, because my goal is to have like a remote controller inside a mobile device, it might even add a login to this working experience and after the login that will lead me to the controller.php page and while on my monitor the video.php will be playing, I can pause and unpause with my phone using controller.php).
Another thing that I don't quite understand is, I would like video.php be like dynamic with for example 3 videos(v1,v2,v3), and open it on monitor1, then have another monitor open that same webpage and run other 3 videos (v4,v5,v6) all working like parallel. (maybe using some ids for the post? video.php?type=sequence1)
Some people have told me to use node.js, but the video.php cannot be dynamic because if I understood correctly the js creates a server with a ip and a port, and I cannot create multiple servers on the same port.
Any ideas?
Just some comments:
It doesn't matter if you using PHP, Node.js, or even Ruby if you want to make certain type of apps, they eventually can be built, just using different implementations.
Node.js essentially allows you to write server side code in JavaScript, so that you can just use 1 language for front-end and back-end.
You probably will need to look at web socket to realize your 'remote' functionality. (think about a live chat app.) Some idea would be you can streaming your video via a readable stream, and your app provide an API to control how it would response by watching the change of states.
You may want to lookup some Node frameworks, such as Express.js to save your time.
I don't understand why you say 'video.php' can not be dynamic (BTW, in Node.js you don't need .php, the idea between PHP and Node.js is totally different). And of course, 1 port can only serve 1 server, because you don't want multiple server against one another.
IMO, I'll assume you just adapted Node.js from PHP, so I will suggest you to look how Node.js is different than PHP, and try to build an normal website (such as a forum, blog or something similar). Your 'mini project' is actually not 'mini' at all, it requires you to leverage many concepts (e.g. readable/writable stream, etc.)...
I have a simple audio sequencer application using javascript and HTML5. The goal of the application is to let users make a beat and save it so other people can open it up, add on to it, then re save. The issue I'm having is the save/open feature. How Do I add this? Or at least where can I start looking fro this solution?
If you are asking for an only-JS solution to this:
Opening Files
You can use the FileAPI to open the files from your users local machine, as long as its your users who are selecting the files manually(you are not digging into the file system yourself).
Here is nice demo for this functionality: http://html5demos.com/file-api
Saving Files
However, saving files was a W3C recommendation that got ditched so your only choice here is to allow your users to download the file. See this relevant question I made some time ago
If I were doing this for a class or prototype I might use PUT or POST requests to save the beat sequence in json form to a web server. When it's time to save your work, take your beat sequence data, convert from a js (I presume) object to a json string and PUT it to an appropriate url on your server. Give it a name and use the name in the url path, like "myserver.com/beats/jpbeat1.json".
When you want to retrieve that beat, issue an HTTP get to the url you saved. You can, of course also maintain and rewrite a directory page in json or html, or you can just navigate the directory offered by your web server. Most developers will think this crude, I imagine, but in a race for time, crude can be good if it meets the requirements.
Choose a web server, the easiest one for you. I might use Amazon S3. Costs money, but available to the internet, has authentication, security features, and supports http GET, PUT of static files. There are many other site hosting services.
For a local install, I might use Node.js. Also very easy to set up to serve static content. For example, the Express framework has static content service and easy examples how to set it up if you are comfortable with Javascript. With Node, you can make the site a bit fancier, by writing server side code to maintain an index, for example. Any real world implementation would require at least some server side code.
There are many other choices. Most developers would want a database, but you don't have to have one if simple files are ok for your class project. It all depends on your requirements.
I hope those ideas are helpful.
I'm working right now on a project that could allow me to generate movies based on the user input. User will upload some samples (photos, movies) to the web app and web server should generate movie based on that input and some predefined movie compositions.
I know that there are plenty of libraries for ffmpeg that could let me connect movies, photos programmatically (for example https://github.com/schaermu/node-fluent-ffmpeg for node.js) , but I was wondering if it's possible to use Aftereffects for that purpose since I have some knowledge in that software. I imagine that there should be set of scripts in Aftereffects that could import user uploaded data, fire the movie renderer and save output to the given location.
Do you think this is achievable using Aftereffects? Or maybe someone had similar problem and solved that differently ?
Cheers!
I have done the exactly same thing.
I DO NOT suggest you use script to do it. I have made the same mistake. Script is fine for a small job, but when you try to use it on a web server and run constantly for days and days it's very unstable. You will be facing a lot of crashing.
I would suggest you use sdk to do the job. It's much more difficult to use sdk than using script, but is more stable and much faster! When you try to create a web service app, you want it to be stable and fast, don't you?
Yes, this is definitely possible. There are existing scripts for rendering and uploading via FTP, and the possibilities are pretty much endless. The part that jumps out at me as needing clarification is "scripts in Aftereffects that could import user uploaded data". This suggests a need for a back-end that "looks for" or "waits for" elements to "appear" in a directory to kick off the ExtendScript script in AE. This is where it gets slightly dicey in that you have to devise a way to do this with a "daemon" in your preferred operating system using any number of languages -- python, Java, AppleScript, shell, batch, etc. The rest of it ("import user uploaded data, fire the movie renderer and save output to the given location") could be done in ExtendScript.
I have a simple offline html5/javascript single-html-file web application that I store in my dropbox. It's a sort of time tracking tool I wrote, and it saves the application data to local storage. Since its for my own use, I like the convenience of an offline app.
But I have several computers, and I've been trying to come up with any sort of hacky way to synchronize this app's data (which is currently using local storage) between my various machines.
It seems that chrome allows synchronization of data, but only for chrome extensions. I also thought I could perhaps have the web page automatically save/load its data from a file in a dropbox folder, but there doesn't appear to be a way to automatically sync with a specific file without user prompting.
I suppose the "obvious" solution is to put the page on a server and store the data in a database. But suppose I don't want a solution which requires me to maintain apps on a server - is there another way, however hacky, to cobble together synchronization?
I even looked for a while to see if there was a vendor offering a web database service - where I could, say, post/get a blob of json on demand, and then somehow have my offline app sync with this service, but the same-origin policy seems to invalidate that plan (and besides I couldn't find such a service).
Is there a tricky/sneaky solution to this problem using chrome, or google drive, or dropbox, or some other tool I'm not aware of? Or am I stuck setting up my own server?
I have been working on a Project that basically gives you versioned localStorage with support for conflict resolution if the same resource ends up being edited by two different clients. At this point there are no drivers for server or client (they are async in-memory at the moment for testing purposes) but there is a lot of code and abstraction to make writing your own drivers really easy... I was even thinking of doing a dropbox/google docs driver myself, except I want DynamoDB/MongoDB and Lawnchair done first.
The code is not dependent on jQuery or any other libraries and there's a pretty full features (though ugly) demo for it as are well.
Anyway the URL is https://github.com/forbesmyester/SyncIt
Apparently, I have exactly the same issue and invetigated it thoroghly. The best choice would be remoteStorage, if you could manage to make it work. It allows to use 3rd party server for data storage or run your own instance.
I am working on a Google Gadget that will collect some data through Google API's. What I am getting stuck on is how to collect the data and then save it somewhere to be processed later. The final idea being that I would run the gadget on my own computer it would collect the data and then save it to somewhere on my own computer. (I guess I want to emphasize that this is, for now, a small personal project and does not necessarily need fancy server scripts, I want to be able to run this all on my PC running XP).
Is there a pure Javascript way to save a file on a computer?
Can I use other languages besides XML, HTML, and Javascript to add functionality to my Google Gadget?
Edit: The goal of this is to be able to log how many of my contacts are signed into gchat over a period of time. I decided on a Gadget because that was the only way I could figure out how to access that information. Any other ways to approach this idea are welcome!
No, Javascript alone cannot save a file automatically. And be careful, javascript is affected by the no cross domain rule. If you're hosting the project on your own computer, why bother writing a complex Google Gadget?
I suggest a simple PHP script, and MySQL, if you like, to store the data. By itself, PHP should be more than enough to run most tasks. If you would like me to add in more info about this, please tell me what type of task.
In increasing order of flexibility:
The options object is almost certainly the easiest approach - not really designed for that kind of usage but I suspect it would be fine for your use case.
On windows you could use system.filesystem to get hold of the WScript FileSystemObject which you can then use to create files and write to them.
Also see the Google desktop API blog for embedding an SQLite database in your gadget (looks pretty easy).