I'm using Node.js for some project work and I would like to monitor my Mongo database (collection) for changes, basically fire an event if something gets added.
Anyone know if this is possible? I'm using the node-mongodb-native drivers.
If it's not I'd also like any available pointers on pushing data from the server (run with node) to the client browser.
The question is if all data is added to your database through your node.js app. If so, you can use the EventEmitter class of node.js to trigger an event (http://nodejs.org/api.html#eventemitter-14).
If the database is populated by some other app, things are getting difficult. In this case you would need something like a database trigger, which is AFAIK not yet availabled in MongoDB.
Pushing Events to the Client (aka Comet) will be possible once the HTML 5 websockets API makes its way into all major browsers.
In the meantime, you can only try to emulate this behaviour using techniques like (long-term) AJAX polling, forever frame etc. but each of them has its weaknesses.
I would turn on replication in your mongodb. There is a replicate? database that contains a list of changes, similar to the mysql replication log. You can monitor that.
-daniel
Almost 3y since the last answer. I would suggest looking at:
Pub Sub for nodejs and MongoDB https://github.com/scttnlsn/mubsub
npm install mubsub should get you there
collection.insert({"key1":val1,"key2":"val2"}, function(err, info){
if(err){
//handle this
}
else{
if(info){
you call a fireandforgetfunction(info); here
that can write to logs or send to SQS or do some other child spawn or in process thing. This could even be a callback but I think a fire and forget may do in most circumstances.
I say fire and forget because I presume you don't need to hold
up the response so you can return what ever you need to the client.
And in part-answer to your other question you can return JSON like this
db.close();
var myJSON =[];
sys.puts("Cool info stored and did a non blocking fire and forget for some other mongo monitoring stuff/process and sending control back to the browser");
sys.puts(sys.inspect(info));//remove later
myJSON.push({"status":"success"});
myJSON.push({"key1":val1,"key2":val2});//or whatev you want to send
res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type" : "text/plain" });
res.write(JSON.stringify(myJSON));
res.end();
}
}
Related
I have the following js code:
stompClient.subscribe('/topic/clients', function (calResult) {
updateClientsTable(JSON.parse(calResult.body));
});
$.get("/clients", null);
and following server code(last line invokes it):
#GetMapping(value = {"/clients"})
#ResponseBody
public void loadClients() {
brokerMessagingTemplate.convertAndSend("/topic/clients", clientService.getClientList());
}
Sometime front-end misses result of $.get("/clients", null);
As I understand problem: at the moment of result getting on front end, subscriptions is not happens.
if to put $.get("/clients", null); below in the code - all works fine.
Can you explain how to await subscriptions established?
I think it would make more sense to not mix REST requests with this messaging pattern.
Have you considered sending the "updateClients" command through SockJS into an "/apps/updateClients" channel which replies to the "/topic/clients" channel?
As #light_303 already mentioned, mixing HTTP requests with notification mechanism isn't good. You can register moment, when client connects (GET request on /clients), but you can't register when he disconnects.
You should think in one of the next ways. When user subscribes to /topic/clients:
You individually send him response with all client list and then push updates only.
You individually send him current server time or some kind of ID and then push updates only. User uses given time/ID in GET request to /clients and receives full client list on that moment. This option can be good in situation, when you have incremental updates (i. e. adding new elements to list) and otherwise not so good.
Check this question: Sending message to specific user on Spring Websocket.
This is actually ridiculous, how Spring can complicate things. I recommend you to look on another frameworks for real-time web communication, such as Vert.x or Netty and on Go programming language. Use WebSockets or SockJS instead of STOMP. All that technologies can give you more flexible and performant solution in obvious way. Also, check Centrifugo project, maybe it's relevant to your task.
You can use #SubscribeMapping annotation from spring-messaging.
If you have spring-messaging configured as described here and here, the server-side code could look like following:
#Controller
public class MessagingController {
#SubscribeMapping("/clients")
public List<Client> loadClients() {
return clientService.getClientList();
}
}
This way you don't have to call $.get("/clients", null); because JS message handler receives result of loadClients() call right after subscription happens. JS code would look like:
stompClient.subscribe('/topic/clients', function (calResult) {
updateClientsTable(JSON.parse(calResult.body));
});
I am building a simple support chat for my website using Ajax. I would like to check if the user that I am currently chatting with left the browser.
At the moment I have build in that feature by setting interval function at customer side that creates the file with name: userId.txt
In the admin area I have created an interval function that checks if userId.txt exists. If it exists, it deletes it. If the file is not recreated by the custom interval function - next time the admin function will find out that file is not there it mark customer with this userId as inactive.
Abstract representation:
customer -> interval Ajax function -> php [if no file - create a new file]
admin -> interval Ajax function -> php [if file exists - delete the file] -> return state to Ajax function and do something
I was wondering if there is any better way to implement this feature that you can think of?
My solution is to use the jquery ready and beforeunload methods to trigger an ajax post request that will notify when the user arrives and leaves.
This solution is "light" because it only logs twice per user.
support.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
//log user that just arrived - Page loaded
$(document).ready(function() {
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: 'log.php',
async:false,
data: {userlog:"userid arrived"}
});
});
//log user that is about to leave - window/tab will be closed.
$(window).bind('beforeunload', function(){
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: 'log.php',
async:false,
data: {userlog:"userid left"}
});
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Your support html code...</h2>
</body>
</html>
log.php
<?php
//code this script in a way that you get notified in real time
//in this case, I just log to a txt file
$userLog = $_POST['userlog'];
file_put_contents("userlog.txt", $userLog."\n", FILE_APPEND );
//userid arrived
//userid left
Notes:
1 - Tested on Chrome, FF and Opera. I don't have a mac so I couldn't test it on Safari but it should work too.
2 - I've tried the unload method but it wasn't as reliable as beforeunload.
3 - Setting async to false on the ajax request means that the statement you are calling has to complete before the next statement, this ensures that you'll get notified before the window/tab is closed.
#Gonzalon makes a good point but using a normal DB table or the filesystem for constantly updating user movement would be exhaustive to most hard disks. This would be a good reason for using shared memory functions in PHP.
You have to differentiate a bit between the original question "How do i check in real-time, if a user is logged in?" and "How can i make sure, if a user is still on the other side (in my chat)?".
For a "login system" i would suggest to work with PHP sessions.
For the "is user still there" question, i would suggest to update one field of the active session named LAST_ACTIVITY. It is necessary to write a timestamp with the last contact with the client into a store (database) and test whether that is older than X seconds.
I'm suggesting sessions, because you have not mentioned them in your question and it looks like you are creating the userID.txt file manually on each Ajax request, right? Thats not needed, unless working cookie and session-less is a development requirement.
Now, for the PHP sessions i would simply change the session handler (backend) to whatever scales for you and what makes requesting information easy.
By default PHP uses the session temp folder to create session files,
but you might change it, so that the underlying session handler becomes a mariadb database or memcache or rediska.
When the users sessions are stored into a database you can query them: "How many users are now logged in?", "Who is where?".
The answer for "How can I check in real time if a user is logged in?" is, when the user session is created and the user is successfully authenticated.
For real-time chat application there are a lot of technologies out there, from "php comet", "html5 eventsource" + "websockets" / "long polling" to "message queues", like RabbitMq/ActiveMq with publish/subscribe to specific channels.
If this is a simple or restricted environment, maybe a VPS, then you can still stick to your solution of intervalic Ajax requests. Each request might then update $_SESSION['LAST_ACTIVITY'] with a server-side timestamp. Referencing: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1270960/1163786
A modification to this idea would be to stop doing Ajax requests, when the mouse movement stops. If the user doesn't move the mouse on your page for say 10 minutes, you would stop updating the LAST_ACTIVITY timestamp. This would fix the problem of showing users who are idle as being online.
Another modification is to reduce the size of the "iam still here" REQUEST to the server by using small GET or HEADER requests. A short HEADER "ping" is often enough, instead of sending long messages or JSON via POST.
You might find a complete "How to create an Ajax Web Chat with PHP, jQuery" over here. They use a timeout of 15 seconds for the chat.
Part 1 http://tutorialzine.com/2010/10/ajax-web-chat-php-mysql/
Part 2 http://tutorialzine.com/2010/10/ajax-web-chat-css-jquery/
You can do it this way, but it'll be slow, inefficient, and probably highly insecure. Using a database would be a noticeable improvement, but even that wouldn't be particularly scalable, depending on how "real-time" you want this to be and how many conversations you want it to be able to handle simultaneously.
You'd be much better off using a NoSQL solution such as Redis for any actions that you'll need to run frequently (ie: "is user online" checks, storing short-term conversation updates, and checking for conversation updates at short intervals).
Then you'd use the database for more long-term tasks like storing user information and saving active conversations at regular intervals (maybe once per minute, for example).
Why Ajax and not Websockets? Surely a websocket would give you a considerably faster chat system, wouldn't require generating and checking a text file, would not involve a database lookup and you can tell instantly if the connection is dropped.
I would install the https://github.com/nrk/predis library. So at the time the user authenticates, It publishes a message to Redis server.
Then you can set-up a little node server on the back-end - something simple like:
var server = require('http').Server();
var io = require('socket.io')(server);
var Redis = require('ioredis');
var redis = new Redis();
var authenticatedUsers = [];
// Subscribe to the authenticatedUsers channel in Redis
redis.subscribe('authenticatedUsers');
// Logic for what to do when a message is received from Redis
redis.on('message', function(channel, message) {
authenticatedUsers.push(message);
io.emit('userAuthenticated', message);
});
// What happens when a client connects
io.on('connection', function(socket) {
console.log('connection', socket.id);
socket.on('disconnect', function(a) {
console.log('user disconnected', a);
});
});
server.listen(3000);
Far from complete, but something to get you started.
Alternatively, take a look at Firebase. https://www.firebase.com/ if you dont want to bother with the server-side
I would suggest using in built HTML5 session storage for this purpose. This is supported by all modern browsers so we will not face issues for the same.
This will help us to be efficient and quick to recognize if user is online. Whenever user moves mouse or presses keys update session storage with date and time. Check it periodically to see if it is empty or null and decide user left the site.
Depending on your resources you may opt for websockets or the previous method called long pool request. Both ensure a bidirectional communication between the server and the client. But they may be expensive on resources.
Here is an good tutorial on the websocket:
http://www.binarytides.com/websockets-php-tutorial/
I would use a callback that you (admin) can trigger. I use this technique in web app and mobile apps to (All this is set on the user side from the server):
Send a message to user (like: "behave or I ban you").
Update user status/location. (for events to know when attendants is arriving)
Terminate user connections (e.g. force log out if maintenance).
Set user report time (e.g. how often should the user report back)
The callback for the web app is usually in JavaScript, and you define when and how you want the user to call home. Think of it as a service channel.
Instead of creating and deleting files you can do the same thing with cookie benefits of using cookie are
You do not need to hit ajax request to create a file on server as cookies are accessible by javascript/jquery.
Cookies have an option to set the time interval so would automatically delete themselves after a time, so you will not need php script to delete that.
Cookies are accessible by php, so when ever you need to check if user is still active or not, you can simply check if the cookie exist
If it were aspnet I would say signalR... but for php perhaps you could look into Rachet it might help with a lot of what you are trying to accomplish as the messages could be pushed to the clients instead of client polling.
Imo, there is no need for setting up solutions with bidirectional communications. You only want to know if a user is still logged in or attached to the system. If I understand you right, you only need a communication from server to client. So you can try SSE (server sent events) for that. The link gives you an idea, how to implement this with PHP.
The idea is simple. The server knows if user is attached or not. He could send something like "hey, user xyz is still logged in" or "hey, user xzy seems not to be logged in any more" and the client only listens to that messages and can react to the messages (e.g. via JavaScript).
The advantage is: SSE is really good for realtime applications, because the server only has to send data and the client has only to listen, see also the specification for this.
If you really need bidirectional communications or can't go with the two dependencies mentioned in the specs, it's not the best decision to use SSE, of course.
Here is a late Update with a nice chat example (written in Java). Probably it's also good to get an idea how to implement this in PHP.
I have a small application where a users can drag and drop a task in an HTML table.
When user drops the task, I call a javascript function called update_task:
function update_task(user_id, task_id, status_id, text, uiDraggable, el) {
$.get('task_update.php?user_id='+user_id+'&task_id='+task_id+'&status_id='+status_id+'', function(data) {
try {
jsonResult = JSON.parse(data);
} catch (e) {
alert(data);
return;
};
In task_update.php I GET my values; user_id, task_id & status_id and execute a PDO UPDATE query, to update my DB. If the query executes correctly, I
echo json_encode ( array (
'success' => true
) );
And then I append the task to the correct table cell
if(typeof jsonResult.success != 'undefined') {
$(uiDraggable).detach().css({top: 0,left: 0}).appendTo(el);
}
This has all worked fine. But, I'm starting to realize, that it's a problem when 2 or more people are making changes at the same time. If I'm testing with 2 browsers, and has the site opened on both for example: Then, if I move a task on browser1, I would have to manually refresh the page at browser2 to see the changes.
So my question is; How can I make my application auto-detech if a change to the DB-table has been made? And how can I update the HTML table, without refreshing the page.
I have looked at some timed intervals for updating pages, but that wouldn't work for me, since I really don't want to force the browser to refresh. A user can for example also create a new task in a lightbox iframe, so it would be incredibly annoying for them, if their browser refreshed while they were trying to create a new task.
So yeah, what would be the best practice for me to use?
Use Redis and its publish/subscribe feature to implement a message bus between your PHP app and a lightweight websocket server (Node.js is a good choice for this).
When your PHP modifies the data, it also emits an event in Redis that some data has changed.
When a websocket client connects to the Node.js server, it tells the server what data it would like to monitor, then, as soon as a Redis event was received and the event's data matches the client's monitored data, notify the client over the websocket, which then would refresh the page.
Take a look at this question with answers explaining all of this in detail, includes sample code that you can reuse.
I would use ajax to check the server at a reasonable interval. What's reasonable depends on your project - it should be often enough that it changes on one end don't mess up what another user is doing.
If you're worried about this being resource intensive you could use APC to save last modified times for everything that's active - that way you don't have to hit the database when you're just checking if anything has changed.
When things have changed then you should use ajax for that as well, and add the changes directly in the page with javascript/jquery.
If you really need to check a db changes - write a database triggers.
But if nobody, except your code, change it - you can to implement some observation in your code.
Make Observation(EventListener) pattern imlementation, or use one of existed.
Trigger events when anything meaningful happened.
Subscribe to this events
I'd like to synchronize Data between two Meteor apps. Therefore I have published a collection with the data in question on both apps (which obviously run the same Meteor version 0.8.1.2 with the exact same packages).
When I run
var testConnection = DDP.connect('http://10.0.10.20:3003/');
var newCollection = new Meteor.Collection('remoteData', testConnection);
testConnection.subscribe('remoteData');
console.log('Data list starts here:');
newCollection.find().forEach(function(data){console.log(data)});
on any client I do get a list of all data like expected. Server side there is nothing so newCollection stays empty (also I know from debugging that the server does actually execute testConnection.subscribe('remoteData') and the other server executes everything within its corresponding publish function just like for clients).
I tried it this way as the poster here https://stackoverflow.com/a/18360441 mentioned something like this works on client and server. Looking in the docs for subscribe ( http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_subscribe ) it says it only works on the client which would explain that nothing happens on my server but would be a bit strange as DDP.connect ( http://docs.meteor.com/#ddp_connect ) seems to be meant for client and server and supports subscribe.
So do I miss something here? And what would be the best way to get a subscribe like functionality between two servers if subscribe really does not work in this scenario?
I know I can work with custom Meteor.methods but this seems a bit like a crutch compared to how nice it would work with subscribe, so I would be very interested in any better solution...
Like user728291 pointed out the problem was that the server in this case isn't waiting for this.ready() in the publish function on the other side and therefore when newCollection.find() is called on the server newCollection still is empty (but will receive data shortly after). It seems that on the client newCollection.find() tries to wait for this.ready() of the servers publish function (also I'm absolutely not sure about this, maybe the reason it works on the client is a totally different one) and therefore on the client it isn't empty at that time.
Anyhow, you are on the safe side when you always trigger find() in the callback of subscribe which will interpret any function as onReady callback (http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_subscribe).
So what guaranteed works on server and client is
var testConnection = DDP.connect('http://10.0.10.20:3003/');
var newCollection = new Meteor.Collection('remoteData', testConnection);
testConnection.subscribe('remoteData', function() {
console.log('Data list starts here:');
newCollection.find().forEach(function(data){console.log(data)});
});
How would I go around creating an auto-updating newsfeed? I was going to use NodeJS, but someone told me that wouldn't work when I got into the thousands of users. Right now, I have it so that you can post text to the newsfeed, and it will save into a mysql database. Then, whenever you load the page, it will display all the posts from that database. The problem with this is that you have to reload the page everytime there is an update. I was going to use this to tell the nodejs server someone posted an update...
index.html
function sendPost(name,cont) {
socket.emit("newPost", name, cont);
}
app.js
socket.on("newPost", function (name,cont) {
/* Adding the post to a database
* Then calling an event to say a new post was created
* and emit a new signal with the new data */
});
But that won't work for a ton of people. Does anyone have any suggestions for where I should start, the api's and/or programs I would need to use?
You're on the right track. Build a route on your Node webserver that will cause it to fetch a newspost and broadcast to all connected clients. Then, just fire the request to Node.
On the Node-to-client front, you'll need to learn how to do long polling. It's rather easy - you let a client connect and do not end the response until a message goes through to it. You handle this through event handlers (Postal.JS is worth picking up for this).
The AJAX part is straightforward. $.get("your/node/url").then(function(d) { }); works out of the box. When it comes back (either success or failure), relaunch it. Set its timeout to 60 seconds or so, and end the response on the node front the moment one event targetted it.
This is how most sites do it. The problem with websockets is that, right now, they're a bit of a black sheep due to old IE versions not supporting them. Consider long polling instead if you can afford it.
(Psst. Whoever told you that Node wouldn't work in the thousands of users is talking through their asses. If anything, Node is more adapted to large concurrency than PHP due to the fact that a connection on Node takes almost nothing to keep alive due to the event-driven nature of Node. Don't listen to naysayers.)