I'm setting up a server using firebase and want to load Tweets dynamically/live from Twitter by filtering them by hashtags.
Basically what I want to do is integrate a live feed of sorts from twitter to load tweets about Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies on my webpage. I'm using Vue CLI for the front end.
I've done extensive research on twitter, signed up for a developer account and had many go's and tries, but without any luck. I am really stuck as there does not seem to be any way to fetch tweets and then display the, live on my front end.
Ì actually do not have any code to show, as I do not even understand how it would be possible.
I've set-up the backend successfully on firebase and do not have any issues with CRUD operations and Authentications etc. What I need is to dynamically load(live) tweets from twitter and then filter them using a hashtag.
I haven't been successful at even understanding if this is possible, so I haven't received any error messages. It seems to me that you can only let users sign in and then they can post tweets through an integrated API.
You have to open a twitter stream in your backend and send the results to the frontend using sockets, if you want it to be updated in real time.
You can check this out to get you started:
Running a Node.JS background process for Twitter streaming API in Firebase
Adding to what Haris has said, another alternative would be to use SSE (Server-Sent Events) since you are only concerned of unilateral communication rather than bilateral communication. A tutorial for this action, however, will depend on the backend framework you are using.
Feel free to consult the following link that suites your framework on how to use SSEs:
Server-Sent Events with Node
Real-Time Web Apps with Server-Sent Events (Express JS)
Server-Sent Events with Fastify (fastify-sse)
Server-Sent Events with Hapi (SuSiE)
Related
I have a website hosted in AWS with a NodeJS backend.
I have Google Ads conversion events being sent from the frontend using gtag.js, but I noticed missing events and a lot of duplication (even if I use transaction IDs with my events)
I has similar issues with Facebook Pixel and was able to resolve the problem by sending simple vanilla http calls from the backend.
Is it possible to do the same with Google Ads? I have not been able to find any documentation for server side APIs for Javascript.
This documentation here seems promising, but no Javascript SDK exists. That's is why I would like to know what vanilla http calls to make.
I have seen documentation about GTM server side, but it seems I need to host a GTM container (server?) which I would prefer not to have to. Unless I misunderstood what hosting a GTM container means in the context of a AWS cloud solution.
In addition to the native, gRPC-based Ads API there's also a REST alternative which can be used if there's no native client library, such as for NodeJS.
The endpoint relevant for your use case is customers.uploadClickConversions, which allows you to register a conversion given a specific click ID.
Keep in mind that you'll need to apply for API access in order to be able to use the Ads API (aside from accessing test accounts).
The problem
I am following a Vue.js 3 tutorial on youtube and I tried to implement the app shown in this video.
Then I started improving it a bit at a time. You can view my project here.
One of the main features I am trying to add is a Hall of Fame component in which you can view the best ten scores of anyone who plays. You can submit your score just after finishing the game. I decided to use Firestore to hold the data.
However, suppose I build the app for production and host it in a server. Then, I can download the whole project on my laptop, change a little bit the logic, and then play it locally on my computer. That way, I can send any type of data to my firestore database (because my credentials are injected in the javascript by Vue). I can then just send the ideal score of 1 ms to hack the game (this is indeed what a friend of mine managed to do).
The question(s)
The question is: how can I prevent this from happening?
Should I make a few changes in the code about the firebase configuration?
Should I use some other way to store the data, and not firestore?
Should I config properly the firestore security rules?
Also, what are the best security practices in JS frameworks like Vue.js (or React, in general) to prevent the insertion of non-wanted data on the client side? How do I manage the connection to a cloud database from such front-end frameworks?
Disclaimer
I learn everything about programming on my own, by watching youtube videos or googling and so on. I am new not only to Vue and Firebase, but to web development in general. Please consider this when answering.
TL;DR;
If the score is calculated on client-side (in browser) you can't secure it.
Anyone can just see the API call being made from the app to the server and replicate that with rest API tool like postman, so you wouldn't even need to download it locally to make changes.
If your game relies on client-side as a source of data, there is no way for the server to ensure that it is un-tampered.
You can try obfuscating the source code and doing client-side data encription, but it's all in javascript so everything is readable.
If you were to implement it in a more secure way, you would have the server trigger an action (as opposed to the script) but then the times would end up being longer because of the data turn-around time. Since the event fired from server to client and back would be reflected, but even then the automated response can be hacked by handling it with a script.
There is an application that should read user tweets for every registered user, process them and store data for future usage.
It can reach Twitter 2 ways: either REST API (poll twitter every x mins), or use its Streaming API to get tweets delivered.
Besides completely different implementations on server side I wonder what are other impacts on server side?
Say application has tousands of users. Is it better to build kind of queue and poll twitter for each user (the simplest scenario), or is it better to use Streaming API and keep HTTP connection open for each user? I'm a bit worried about the latter as it'd require keeping tousands of connections open all the time. Are there any drawbacks of that I'm not aware of? If I'd like to deploy my app on Heroku or on EC2 instance, would it be ok or are there any limits?
How it is done in other apps that constantly need getting data for each user?
Say, I'm developing a Windows (if OS is important) application that will be available to download for free and I would like then to collect some usage statistics. In the easiest case - count of application launches. It looks superfluous to maintain a server (e.g. VDS) just for this.
I've been thinking to use Google Analytics for this (manually send requests to GA server). This will probably work, but it is not GA designed for - the idea looks like a hack.
What are the options here?
I don't think this is a hack. It's all just data about user interaction. There is little logical difference between opening a desktop app and clicking a button vs opening a web page and following a link. Both are measurable user actions you can track, aggregate and put on graphs.
In fact, Google provides a lower level HTTP based "Measurement Protocol" that is intended for exactly that.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/
From the overview:
The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol allows developers to make
HTTP requests to send raw user interaction data directly to Google
Analytics servers. This allows developers to measure how users
interact with their business from almost any environment
Just put an HTTP request with the correct parameters in your application launch or button click code and it will collect the data. Any data you want to collect.
In other answers to this question there are suggestions like making web services or storing the data locally but why reinvent the wheel? Google Analytics already provides the collecting and reporting tools and it seems like a good solution.
We have a very basic application (iOS/Android) done in Appcelerator that will receive a single update every week. This update will be sent to all the users subscribed to the push notifications service.
By this moment, we have around 35k installs but 7,000 active users on this application on last month. We've been evaluating two services for all the push notifications:
StackMob
Parse
Appcelerator Cloud services is fine, but we're not willing to pay that much. Parse and StackMob prices are lower than Appcelerator Cloud services and by our analysis, we could even use the free service on both services (StackMob = 60k push notifications + 60k api calls, and Parse 1M api calls + 1M pushes).
If we're going to use Parse, we'll need to buy the Android and iOS module from the Marketplace ($30/year each). Which is fine. On the counterpart, I think we could use the REST API on StackMob for subscribing to the push service.
Questions:
What are your thoughts on both services? Which one do you prefer and why?
Have you used StackMob REST API for subscribing to push notifications?
How do you retrieve Android's token?
Is there any (cost effective) alternative to these services? I also reviewed PubNub, which seems to be great but costs are higher than StackMob and Parse.
Thanks in advance.
Update
I asked the same question on Appcelerator forums. After a while, users came back with several answers and users using Parse.com for this.
I ended implementing Parse.com, which was really simple by using the Android and iOS plugins that are on the Appcelerator Market.
I wanted to chime in and point you to some StackMob references around Appcelerator.
Aaron Saunders has several projects on github showing how to use StackMob with Appcelerator.
https://github.com/aaronksaunders
He also wrote a series of blog posts about it.
http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2011/11/titanium-appcelerator-quickie-stackmob-api-module-part-one.html
Our REST API reference is available at https://developer.stackmob.com/tutorials/dashboard/REST-API-Reference
One of the big differentiators between StackMob and others is our custom code option. You can write your own logic in Java, Scala or Clojure and host it on StackMob. The custom code can interact with your user data and other 3rd party APIs.
https://developer.stackmob.com/tutorials/custom%20code
I haven't used those services myself, so I cant comment. However, Another alternative we use (and have been pretty happy with) is Urban Airship. It's relatively cost effective, supports Android, iOS and BB and it has server side libraries for a bunch different languages. There is also a neat blog post outlining how to easily do device registration (at least for iOS) via simple web requests in Appcelerator.
The blog post on its Appcelerator integration is here.