For a school group project we're asked to make a sort of scheduling application, we are free to set it up any way we want but i dont have any experience in web developing.
For the backend we've decided on java for the logic and a mongodb database but i'm exploring options for frontend development so far javascript has peeked my interest but i need some directions for what to look into
I was wondering if i could make a connection between javascript (if there are no more intresting options) and the java program running on my (virtual) machine and if i could host a webserver myself or need to look for a hosting service
Lessons on this topic start following next week but i want to make a head start and have a n idea were to look into
Thanks very much in advance!
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I recently started developing my first (rather crappy) webpage. It is for my commune that just displays who has to clean the kitchen on a given day and a picture of him. Now I would also like to make a little rating system, where you can give a rating between 1 and 5 starts. Is there any way to persist the rating without using a database? Could I, for example, just save it to a textfile that i read to and write from?
edit:
The website is hosted on an apache server
The short answer is no.
To store anything on the server, you're going to need to learn a server-side language, like PHP, C#, or Java. Any server framework will already have stuff built in for working with a database, so if you go and reinvent your own, you'll just be creating more work for yourself. If I were you, I'd start with some simple tutorials for your server language of choice.
Also consider that even a simple rating system isn't as trivial as you might think. Some things you may want:
Authentication: should everyone in the world be able to access your site?
Permissions: can anyone update any rating?
So, I have been learning Vue.js as my first js framework for some time and after I made some simple SPA:s without much interactions with a server I started to wonder: What should a backend be like with Vue? For education purposes I gave it a try and came up with some pattern on my own and now I can't imagine anything else, maybe I got some wrong idea.
What I came up with: I made a simple API with PHP which was receiving requests from the frontend (Vue component methods reacting on UI events) and requesting data from the model or updating data through it.
There are a lot of different Backend Solutions and you should take what fits your websites purpose and also personal preference the best.
If Backend includes Hosting in your case then you basicly have the 2 big options:
a) A Server where you run it ex. via an Reverse Proxy (example: Digital Ocean)
b) A cloud computing Platform (example: AWS, Heroku, App Engine)
But you only need to host it that way if you actually run the app and retrieve dynamic updates on the page, new routes get added when you for example publish a new Post.
If that is not the case then a static hosting provider would be enough, there are 1000´s of them and they are pretty uncomplicated.
If you mean which Database to use, then it also comes down to preference, do you want a SQL Databse or a NoSQL Database like MongoDB? As a personal recommendation I would suggest you to use Firebase as your backend for your experimental app, the free plan is far than enough for testing purposes, you also have a smooth and easy to integrate Authentication System avaliable and you can also take quick advantage of things like Push Messages, Cloud Storage Buckets and more.
Note that Im not related to FB by any means and this is just a personal recommendation, but I feel like your Question is pretty opinion based so maybe be more specific about your goals or just comment down below if you got any more questions.
I'm still new to web development. To learn more about JavaScript(JS) and web development, I am thinking of writing a simple web app which pulls and records time-series data (say, the price of a stock) periodically and draws a live chart showing the historical data. In addition to price data, I would like the app to record/maintain some user-related info such as the ticker of the stock(s) associated to each user.
Ideally, I would like to keep the app light-weight and portable/standalone (meaning, reduce the dependency as much as possible, and the end user hopefully doesn't have to do a lot of configuration/install of dependencies). The issue that I cannot figure out is where to store the historical data. I looked around for database solutions which will allow the app to write data directly from the browser (that is, using JS) to the client's machine. LocalStorage and IndexDB are non-persistent as far as I understand. Some suggested using PouchDB, but upon looking at it closer, it seems like the user need to install CouchDB or some compatible DB (say, SQLite). But that means I cannot share my app with users who aren't technical enough to install and configure CouchDB or SQLite on their machine before using my app.
If anyone could share some insights as to which DB might allow a JS-based app to write persistent data to the client's machine (if such thing even exist), that would be greatly helpful. If there is no such DB solution, please feel free to let me know alternative solutions that would allow the goal of building a simple, portable, JS-based web app. Thank you!
I think the best solution is to use Electron.js. The whole idea of this framework is to create web apps that can reside on client machines. You could package up any DB option you want, or even better, just include an API to your backend through the web app and it will work on your client machine like I think you want it to.
As for DB options, there is a great thread on S.O. that talks about what is possible. It looks like knex.js is your best bet (full disclosure - I haven't used knex).
I am asked to project a web solution to allow vote casting in public assemblies.
The solution shall be written with node.js on the server, and javascript, possibly using angular.js on the client (since javascript is the language I know best, today :-).
The app shall run on mobile devices, and will be quite simple: it shall handle some sort of authentication, to identify the owner of the device (the 'user'), and shall show a form with two buttons (Yes and No).
The button press shall be sent to a central server (on the LAN).
The server shall collect and store the votes from the users, and shall choose when to enable the buttons (voting session opened), and when to disable them (voting session closed).
Trying to be clearer, the app shall replace current devices, which look like this one:
It's not so clear from the picture, but the device has two buttons, one for "Yes" vote, and one for "No" (there are more buttons, but their use is irrilevant, here).
Initially the app will handle only the vote casting (not the audio).
I'm totally new to web realtime programming, so I'm in doubt about which software stack of libraries to adopt for the project.
Googling around, I see socket.io could be a good solution, but I prefer asking the community, to try to find the most suited solution for the job.
So the final question: do you know of any open-source project, tutorial, bolg post, anything I could study to start designing the app I tried to describe?
Any solution, observation, opinion, real-life experience would be welcome, too...
I would also look at PubNub, which is a realtime global data stream network--here's a good voting app tutorial to get started: https://www.pubnub.com/blog/2014-11-18-power-a-realtime-voting-app-with-live-results-using-d3js/
There's great developer resources to get your started, for help, and lots of add-ons, like presence, history, and realtime charts, like EON: https://www.pubnub.com/developers/eon/
Socket.io is used essentially when you need something in realtime. The tradition RESTful APIs are a better/proven method.
To get started I would suggest reading up on the MEAN stack (also allows you to use the MongoDB database), A couple of tutorials should be a good starting point :
https://scotch.io/tutorials/setting-up-a-mean-stack-single-page-application
https://thinkster.io/mean-stack-tutorial
https://www.npmjs.com/package/slush-meanjs is a good resource to scaffold out your project. Slush is a generator that uses GULP as compared to yeoman generators which are only just beginning to implement gulp as its task-runner (currently uses grunt as the default task runner). Yeoman still doesnt have a great generator for the MEAN stack. If however you plan to exclude the database a good starting point would be to just use express on the backend and angularjs as the front end. To do this you can scaffold out a express project using generator-express (https://github.com/petecoop/generator-express) and once express is setup you can add angular to it using https://github.com/yeoman/generator-angular.
The directory would look something like this :
-app
---*client side libs*
-bin
--- www /* npm start to start the server */
-routes/ /* for all your express routing */
-test/
...
-app.js
...
For authentication you could use the scaffolded out CRUD model. If using socket.io for all the client server communication this is a good resource -
https://auth0.com/blog/2014/01/15/auth-with-socket-io/
I require some advice in terms of choice of language, I hope that I'm allowed to ask this question here.
To provide some framework information:
As from next week, I'll be following a Java course to get my graduate degree in programming.
For this graduate, they mention that we'll need to develop a webapp in Java.
At the same time, coincidence wants that we are currently developing a webapp that allows users to search popular activities (events) and follow hashtags to render a specific activity feed.
For the front end we currently use some client libraries (Marionette, Backbone, Underscore, Requirejs).
For the server front end (router, rendering server pages), we currently use nodejs.
The question is if it would be a good choice to use Java to build the REST service (to serve both the server and client front ends). The webapp includes a social network, organisers can create their own profile, users can bookmark all sorts of things, ... well, there will be pretty database intensive actions (we'll be using a relatively complex relational model with MySQL).
We might still be using Node to handle push notifications with web sockets but we haven't really discussed this yet.
Since we'll get time at school to work on our project in group, I'd have plenty of time to build the backend REST api with Java which seems like a huge opportunity for me in terms of time. I'm just wondering if there would be any real tradeoffs to do it with Java for this purpose.
Thanks.
I think this would be a huge opportunity to build a REST backend in Java.
Take a look at Spring for a fast and effective way to server HTML
Also you could look at Spring Boot for serving REST APIs. If you follow the tutorials you'll be up an running in minutes.
Good luck