I had little experience writing a web based inventory management system using jsp, tomcat, and db in mysql.
Ever since then, I changed my career as an embedded software engineer(so my knowledge about this topic is rather outdated), and I need to write a web format based code tracking tool with localized database and no server running like a tomcat.
So I decided to give sqllite a try since it does not require a sever running. But I am not sure what to replace a web container with. (I might be little confused here)
basically I need something like below:
1. user accesses web based interface
2. user requests code tracking or source browsing
3. something(that does not require a server running) handles request and extracts information and displays possible matching links
db will be replaced with sqlite, and no tomcat will run. But then I am not sure how I can make "something" in 3) work :(
I'd really appreciate any suggestion.
Related
I've recently created two C# console applications. The first transforms a bunch of command outputs into an XML, and the second transforms the XML into a Word document using a template.
I'd like to know how I could get this onto the web, i.e having a web page where the command output can be uploaded, the two step conversion executed, and finally the Word document made available for download.
Should the web page be created in ASP.NET or are there other (better) options? Do I need to rewrite the console applications in some other format?
This question is fairly broad, with plenty of room for novel sized explanations, but here's a brief highlevel walk through of what likely needs to happen to achieve the proposed results (language agnostic):
Get a hosting provider that allows users to spin up their own machine (i.e. AWS).
Spin up a machine that is compatible with the "console" programs in question.
Install "console" programs on machine.
Install a programming language (i.e. Node.js, PHP, ASP.NET, even C# could do) on the machine.
Install a web server (i.e. NGINX, Apache) on machine, configure it to serve public requests and run with chosen language.
On server request, execute appropriate commands from within the chosen language. Languages typically come with a exec method (i.e. in node.js: require('child_process').exec(command,options,callback))
Get the results of said commands and send it back to the client. Alternatively (for downloads), write the result to a path on the system that is publicly available to the internet and redirect the user to that url (additional configuration might be required to make sure the browser downloads the file as oppose to just serving it).
The steps above should get you pretty close to that you want. As for your questions:
Should the web page be created in ASP.NET or are there other (better)
options?
The "better" options is whatever you feel most comfortable with at the moment, you could always change it later with reasonable effort (assuming that your "console" apps are not unsuspecting unicorns).
Do I need to rewrite the console applications in some other format?
No, unless you have strong reasons to do so (i.e. multi environment compatibility). You could also rewrite to significantly simplify (i.e. bypass working with a CLI and do everything in C#).
Try thinking through these high level steps, begin working on a implementation, and post more specific questions here on StackOverflow when you get stuck.
I hope that helps!
My friend asked me to make a registration software for his blood donation camp. He told me that he can't host an ASP.NET or PHP page.
Also that since they'll be running the software in many systems, which may not be interconnected, they may not be able to use a Database server.
Is there a way to store/read data from an MS-Excel or MS-Access file instead of any other database?
Also that I wish to make the front end using HTML & JavaScript/JQuery.
As you problem is little bit twicky. Since your app will run on various machine so you want to develop standalone app in Html / Jquery. Also you cannot use db server bcoz of lack of connectivity. So in such scenario i will suggest you to go for Win Form app with a lightweight db like MS Access and Sqlite. Which ever you prefer. Since you are keeping Network aside so i suggest you to not use HTML/Jquery to use access or Excel as it looks logical very easy to use interop with excel but implementation is quite messy. In that time you can finalize the winform app with any of the database with lots of ease.
Disclaimer, I am technical support and sysadmin for my company, not a developer. I'm not after the specifics, simply an idea if what I'd like to acheive is possible or not.
We host hundreds of instances of our in-house classic ASP legacy ecommerce software application and due to countless customisations by clients and ourselves, version management is nightmarish, custom code can't be managed and we've given up releasing new features and mass deploying bug fixes due to the inability to track who needs what patches where.
Parellel to this question I am making management scripts to better automate this though.
What however I'd really like to do is using the miniumum possible effort, port the application code (not the database) to a single code base. Questions I have:
Can ASP relatively effeciently handle connecting to different databases depending on the host header being called? I plan some basic extension to the routine, get hostheader
lookup up db credentials in metadb, set application connection string accordingly logic.
The application writes a few files to the webserver from the database for caching purposes, I'd like to handle this by emulating this behaviour by writing it to something like /masterapp/customer1/specificfile.htm then changing the references to /specificfile.htm in the code to more like /masterapp/shop name/specificfile.htm. Obviously the routines that write specificfile.htm would write to the new location accordingly. Does this seem reasonable?
Other webserver-bound store specific contents like images and csv files I need to keep working without URLs changing ideally, can ASP employ logic to redirect get requests for /images/example.jpg to either /masterapp/shop name/images/example.jpg or /shopname/images/example.jpg depending again on host header? Or could that be done via isapirewrite? (which we already use)
I think these are the biggest challenges. I don't need a complete project plan of how to implement each of these things, I just want to know if it's possible. If the answer is 'yes' I should be able to sell my bosses on the development due to saving support time and our in-house developers could hopefully manage this.
This should be possible and I have achieved similar outcomes with code developed that way from the start. As you are retrofitting this in it's going to be a lot harder, but that's separate to your actual question.
To answer your actual points:
Presumably your DB connection string is already in a application variable or settings file? If so, you just need some logic in your global.asa Session_OnStart that reads the host header and selects the appropriate DB string. This could be hard coded or you could have a "control" DB that stores sites, their DB strings file paths etc and pulls the details into the session object.
This is related to the above, pull your cache storage locations from the DB, or have a "directory name friendly" base name for each site, so you can have "/masterapp/" & Session("strSiteBaseName") & "/cache/somefile.htm"
If you're on IIS7 then you can use the URL rewrite module to handle this, if you're on IIS6 there are 3rd party tools you can get to do URL rewriting for you. Again I have done this so can vouch for it working. If you want to get really clever, you can have your master app create the rewrite files for you and "touch" web.config to get them loaded into IIS.
One "gotcha" you'll have with host headers is remember to handle www and no-www records!
You mentioned custom code as well for each site, I haven't done this in production but have tested outside an app and you can rewrite functions after they've already been declared. You can't have includes with variable names, but you can load in a text file and execute it, so there is a way to have custom functions, or changed core functions specific to an individual instance of your over-arching app.
Ok, so here's the thing.
I'm developing an existing (it started being an ASP classic app, so you can imagine :P) web application under ASP.NET 4.0 and SQLServer 2005. We are 4 developers using local instances of SQL Server 2005 Express, having the source-code and the Visual Studio database project
This webapp has several "universes" (that's how we call it). Every universe has its own database (currently on the same server) but they all share the same schema (tables, sprocs, etc) and the same source/site code.
So manually deploying is really annoying, because I have to deploy the source code and then run the sql scripts manually on each database. I know that manual deploying can cause problems, so I'm looking for a way of automating it.
We've recently created a Visual Studio Database Project to manage the schema and generate the diff-schema scripts with different targets.
I don't have idea how to put the pieces together
I would like to:
Have a way to make a "sync" deploy to a target server (thanksfully I have full RDC access to the servers so I can install things if required). With "sync" deploy I mean that I don't want to fully deploy the whole application, because it has lots of files and I just want to deploy those new or changed.
Generate diff-sql update scripts for every database target and combine it to just 1 script. For this I should have some list of the databases names somewhere.
Copy the site files and executing the generated sql script in an easy and automated way.
I've read about MSBuild, MS WebDeploy, NAnt, etc. But I don't really know where to start and I really want to get rid of this manual deploy.
If there is a better and easier way of doing it than what I enumerated, I'll be pleased to read your option.
I know this is not a very specific question but I've googled a lot about it and it seems I cannot figure out how to do it. I've never used any automation tool to deploy.
Any help will be really appreciated,
Thank you all,
Regards
Have you heard of the term Multi-Tenancy? It might be worth look that up to see if that applied to your "Multiverse" especially if one universe is never accessed by another...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx
UPDATE:
If the application and database is the same for each client (or Tenant) I believe there are applications that may help in providing the same code/db as an SaaS application? ie another application/configuration layer on top that can handle the deployments etc?
I think these are called Platform as a Service (PaaS) applications:
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
Multi-Tenancy in your case may be possible, depending on client security requirements, with a bit of work (or a lot of work):
Option 1:
You could use the one instance of the application, ie deploy the site once and connect to a different database for each client. You would need to differentiate each client by URL to isolate content/data byt setting a connection string for each etc. (This would reduce your site deployments to one deployment)
Option 2:
You could create both a single instance of the application and use a single database. You would need to add a "TenantID" to each table and adjust all your code to accept a TenantID to ensure data security/isolation. Again you wold need to detect/differentiate the Tenant based on the URL to set the TenantID for the session used for every database call. (This would reduce your site and database deployment to one of each)
We have a web application that uses AJAX to talk to an ASP.NET web service. We would like to write another version that can be used offline. We need to be able to re-use our existing code as much as possible. What approaches should we consider?
The app is currently using XmlHttpRequest to get dynamic data from the server. Obviously the offline version will not be able to talk to the server, but it does need to talk to something! I'm sure installing IIS or Cassini on the client would work, but I was hoping for a simpler solution. Is there no other way for JavaScript to talk to some external code?
There are plenty offline web apps nowaday. It simply evolve from AJAX.
For example:
WoaS (wiki on a stick / stickwiki), Tiddly Wiki,
Google doc and Gmail is going to be offline.
You don't need a webserver to run these webapps in offline mode. Just store the required data, scripts on the client side (usually as XML).
One of the possibilities would be to use Cassini. This is a web server that acts as a host for the ASP.Net runtime. You can host Cassini in a Windows application or a Windows Service. In this scenario you do not have to rewrite the web app and the web service.
Most other solutions do require a rewrite of both your web app and your web service. Depending on the way you have written the existing app you can reuse more or less code.
Have you considered HTML5 with application cache and offline storage?
If you hope to create an "offline" version of your package your biggest issue by far will be the need to install your site into a local copy of IIS (registering a virtual directory, etc.). I pursued this briefly a few years ago and gave up in frustration. It can be done: a number of software vendors such as DevExpress do this so you have local copies of their demonstration projects. Indeed, I was able to do this. The problem was the classic "it works on my computer" syndrome. There was simply no way to guarantee that most of my end-users had anywhere near the technical proficiency to make this work.
Thus, I would strongly recommend that you not pursue this path unless you have very technically proficient users and a huge support staff.
But there is one more very important question: did you abstract all data access code to a DAL? If not, then you have a lot of work to do in managing data access as well.
Update: user "Rine" has recommended Cassini. I just wanted to let you know that I pursued Cassini and another 3rd-party web server as well. I think that there are licensing issues with Cassini but may be wrong - it has been awhile. However, I do distinctly remember running into barrier after barrier with this approach and very little documentation to help me out.
if you want a web application run offline, you need a webserver (IIS for ASP) bound to the localhost (127.0.0.1) address. After this so can access your web application by typing http://127.0.0.1/ in your web browser the same way as you do online.
If your AJAX relies on XMLHttpRequest's, you can:
Make the static versions of XML's you get over XMLHttpRequest and put then into a folder on disk.
Rewrite your XMLHttpRequest URL's so that they point to files on disk.
Rewrite your XMLHttpRequest's so that they don't check status (it's always 0 for the file:// protocol.
All JScript works on file:// pages as well as on http:// ones.
Of course it's not the best way to develop static pages, but it may save you some time on rewriting.
I havent come across any framework specifically built for asp.net like the ones available for PHP or RoR.
Here is a good article by Steven to get you started with HTML 5 and ASP.Net Creating HTML 5 Offline application
Obviously the offline version will not be able to talk to the server, but it does need to talk to something!
Enter HTML5 LocalStorage. It works like a database and enables you to put data on your client. Indeed you have to rework parts of your code in javascript and transmit it to the client, but then it would work offline.
Local Storage works like this:
- Setter: window.localStorage.setItem(KEY, VALUE)
- Getter: window.localStorage.getItem(KEY)
- Remove: window.localStorage.removeItem(KEY)
To get the main page working offline you need to create a manifest. This is used to store complete sites on the client. Please refer to this for more information about manifests:
http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html
You want to build a web application to work offline?? It can't be done.
You could split the interface code from the rest (in diferent dlls) and create a windows application to mimic the behaviour of your web application. This way you have 2 distinct user interfaces but the same code for business rules and data access.
I don't really see any other way...