I am creating software that helps me and my colleagues to work on tickets at work, as our current software is really bad. At this moment I am using program that I wrote in Tampermonkey, it is giving information about queue and all other fancy stuff. But I reached limit of that, as website is a limitation, so I started to create website that could do much more, yet I am not sure how to connect it as when I am using Tampermonkey to create overlay with all needed data. My idea was to: 1) Gather all data by tampermonkey and send it to nodejs server. Node would keep array (that's all I need) locally and then I would be able to access it.
Is this possible, is this a correct approach? Unfortunately I am limited by options that I can use by company security policy.
Related
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.
I have a personal finances spreadsheet on my Google Drive.
For some practice and ease of use, I wanted to make a desktop and mobile app to manipulate it:
add an expense
list my expenses
filter the expenses
etc...
Is there a way to do this?
Since it is something so small, I'm trying to avoid anything that needs a dedicated server that I would need to set up or needing to rent any services because it's just a ease of use project and not a "must-have".
I've been searching a lot but most of the time I get confused with responses from 2-3 years ago.
EDIT:
So I found a way, using this video:
https://youtu.be/3OakodfKjrU
Basically using Google App Script you can make some post and get requests, which for me is a step in the right direction. Just needed to think outside of the box a little and I got a simple way to send post requests to create or update, and get requests to read, for now I also use get to delete but this just seems wrong, might change later.
Also I've searched and started doing a PWA (progressive web app) to be the interface, just so I can make it with a single code base and work with almost any device, using pure js, html and css, the only "non-pure" thing is Onsen Ui for the GUI.
You can use an NPMJS package such as google-spreadsheet to work with the Google APIs and manipulate your spreadsheet; the issue for you with trying to build the app without your own server is the need to securely store your Google Account credentials (you don't want this being publicly accessible).
If you could compromise and use a read-only solution, a package such as tabletop might suffice as you don't need to bother with any back-end work; I doubt this would be ideal for you though. You will need to host the application regardless if you want to be able to access it through the world wide web.
Alternatively, you could run the application locally if you would be happy with only being able to use the app that way. Hope it helps and sorry for the rambling!
I would like to write a script to access data on a website, such as:
1) automatically searching a youtuber's profile for a new posting, and printing the title of it to stdout.
2) automatically posting a new video, question, or comment to a website at a specified time. For a lot of sites, there is a required login, so that is something that would need to be automated as well.
I would like to able to do all this stuff from the command line.
What set of tools should I use for this? I was intending to use Bash, mostly because I am in the process of learning it, but if there are other options, like Python or Javascript, please let me know.
In a more general sense, it would be nice to know how to read and directly interact with a website's JS; I've tried looking at the browser console, but I can't make much sense of it.
Python or Node (JS) will probably be a lot easier for this task than Bash, primarily because you're going to have to do OAuth to get access to the social network.
Or, if you're willing to get a bit "hacky", you could issue scripts to PhantomJS, and automate the interaction with the sites in question...
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've written a simple web page that uses Javascript to control a Quicktime plugin for movie playback. There's also some AJAX stuff using jquery to get info on the movies from an MSSQL database. The web page is served to the user from an Apache 2.0 server, this also hosts MSSQL. The end users will view the page in IE6 (unfortunately).
My problem is that the end users now want to use an RS422 jog/shuttle deck control to drive the movie timeline, in place of another jog/shuttle unit that relied on emulating keypresses which was easy for me to detect.
As I'm not a programmer I'm at a loss what to start looking at for a solution to receive the RS422 data and then send that to the Javascript to control the timeline. Is this something that a custom activeX bit of code could do? I've googled ActiveX with Javascript but it's unclear to me (as a novice) how the two work together, or whether this would be suitable at all.
If anyone could give me an overview of what to start researching that'd be much appreciated.
Many thanks.
Jon
JavaScript runs in a sandbox and has no access to the computer at all (for security reasons; you really don't want to make it any more simple for frauds to get at your credit card data).
ActiveX would work but it's a security risk, too. ActiveX is written in C++, no JavaScript there. You'll find information about that on the M$ Website. Note that ActiveX is usually disabled today because of said security risks. Depending how serious your client take security, the virus scanner might not allow to start an A/X control.
Another option would be to write small program which is installed on the client's computer that reads the serial port and send that to the web server where your JavaScript can query it. Okay, that's more than a bit convoluted but probably the least risky.
Or you write a program which transforms the serial codes into key presses (just create the event and post it to Windows). Again, you need C++ or maybe Python with the win32 package.
Your client must understand that this is something which sounds incredibly simple but you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work. A web browser is not a local application with full reign of the hardware (and it must never be).