I need to make an application which will access an URL(like http://google.com) and return the time spent to load all elements(images, css, js...) and compare this results with the previous results.
This application need to be a Desktop app, and I will save the informations in a text file ou xml, and use this file do compare with previous results.
I have searched for a similar application, but nothing...
There are some plugins for firefox that list these elements, like Yslow or Firebug, but not what I need.
So, i'm totally lost and I don't know how to start this work?
Exists the possibility of make this application? What language is better for this type of application?
Thks!
This is a very objective question, so without you elaborating more on your requirements, you may not get any useful answers.
Some things you would need to answer are: how many URLs you want to check, where are you wanting to store the results (database, files etc), does it need to run on the desktop or on a server etc.
Personally, I like the statistics that cURL gives you - DNS time, connect time, receive time etc - so you could write something in PHP, but as I stress that is personal preference and may not suit your situation.
Related
This is more of an advise / best practice question that I'm hoping someone has come across before and can give me a steer.
I need to build a web application (the client would like webforms because that's what their developers know for when i hand it over)
Essentially when the client logs in, they will pick a language then I need to replace the text for menus, input boxes etc. The client wants to add their translations and update them at any time.
Ideas I have looked at are:
Holding the translations in resource files, building an editor in to the web application and then adding attributes on the fly to my viewmodels.
Holding the translations in sql server so i have the name, language and translation as a lookup e.g. Home | French | Maison. Then on pre-render I'll scrape the screen for any controls needing translation in the menu, labels, text areas.
Does anyone know of any good examples or had the experience of doing this themselves.
I've a similar situation, and chose to store data in SQL.
Translation mistakes happen often, and you don't want to recompile or disassemble every time.
It is possible to avoid the need to republish, but I've found it just more intuitive and straightforward to maintain SQL.
Bottom line, it depends on the amount of data you have. If it's more than just a couple of keywords, it sounds like a job for SQL to me.
Edit:
In a similar question, users recommend using resources, claiming it is the standard method.
However, if your users are going to make changes to values on regular basis (not because of mistake correction, but because data actually changes), then SQL seems best fit for the job.
I've been using this site for quite a while, usually being able to sort out my questions by browsing through the questions and following tags. However, I've recently come across a question that is rather hard to lookup amongst the great number of questions asked - a question I hope some of you might be able to share your opinion on.
As my problem is a bit hard to fit into a single line, going in the title, I'll try to give a bit more details on the problem I've encountered. So, as the title says I need to filter, or limit, some of the response data my standard ASP.NET Soap-based Web service returns on invoking various web methods. The web service is used to return data used by other systems (a data repository more or less), where the client today is able to specify a few parameters on how the data should be filtered and in return a full-set of data back.
Well, easy enough I thought, just put additional filtering options on the existing web methods which needs a bit more filtered applied, make adjustments on the server-side and we are all set to go - well, unfortunately it turned out to be a bit more tricky then this.
The problem I am facing is that I'm working on a web service running in a production environment, which needs to be extended in such that additional filters can be applied to existing web method being invoked w/o affecting the calls already being made by other systems used by the customer using their client stubs. This is where I am a bit troubled, since I can't seem to find a "right solution" on extending the current web service.
Today, the filter is send as a custom data structure which holds information on which data should filtered, but I am not sure if I can simply just add more information to this data structure w/o breaking code at the clients? One of my co-workers suggested that I could implement a solution where I would extend the web.config on the server-side to hold a section with details on which data should be excluded (filtered out), but I don't find this to be a viable solution long-sighted - and I don't trust customers with such an option since this is likely to go wrong at some point. So the solution I am looking for is a way that I can apply a "second filter" to the data I am requesting from the client so instead of getting a full-set of data back it should only give a fraction, it implemented in such that the filter can be easily modified and it must not affect the current client calls.
Any suggestions on how I should approach this problem?
Thanks!
Kind regards,
E.
A pretty common practice is to create another instance of the application OR use part of the url to signify the version of the endpoint they are connecting to, perhaps the virtual directory is the date. That way old calls will go to the old API and new calls will come in on the new API.
http://api.example.com/dostuff
vs
http://api.example.com/6-7-2011/dostuff
A client wants to "Web-enable" a spreadsheet calculation -- the user to specify the values of certain cells, then show them the resulting values in other cells.
(They do NOT want to show the user a "spreadsheet-like" interface. This is not a UI question.)
They have a huge spreadsheet with lots of calculations over many, many sheets. But, in the end, only two things matter -- (1) you put numbers in a couple cells on one sheet, and (2) you get corresponding numbers off a couple cells in another sheet. The rest of it is a black box.
I want to present a UI to the user to enter the numbers they want, then I'd like to programatically open the Excel file, set the numbers, tell it to re-calc, and read the result out.
Is this possible/advisable? Is there a commercial component that makes this easier? Are their pitfalls I'm not considering?
(I know I can use Office Automation to do this, but I know it's not recommended to do that server-side, since it tries to run in the context of a user, etc.)
A lot of people are saying I need to recreate the formulas in code. However, this would be staggeringly complex.
It is possible, but not advisable (and officially unsupported).
You can interact with Excel through COM or the .NET Primary Interop Assemblies, but this is meant to be a client-side process.
On the server side, no display or desktop is available and any unexpected dialog boxes (for example) will make your web app hang – your app will behave flaky.
Also, attaching an Excel process to each request isn't exactly a low-resource approach.
Working out the black box and re-implementing it in a proper programming language is clearly the better (as in "more reliable and faster") option.
Related reading: KB257757: Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
You definitely don't want to be using interop on the server side, it's bad enough using it as a kludge on the client side.
I can see two options:
Figure out the spreadsheet logic. This may benefit you in the long term by making the business logic a known quantity, and in the short term you may find that there are actually bugs in the spreadsheet (I have encountered tons of monster spreadsheets used for years that turn out to have simple bugs in them - everyone just assumed the answers must be right)
Evaluate SpreadSheetGear.NET, which is basically a replacement for interop that does it all without Excel (it replicates a huge chunk of Excel's non-visual logic and IO in .NET)
Although this is certainly possible using ASP.NET, it's very inadvisable. It's un-scalable and prone to concurrency errors.
Your best bet is to analyze the spreadsheet calculations and duplicate them. Now, granted, your business is not going to like the time it takes to do this, but it will (presumably) give them a more usable system.
Alternatively, you can simply serve up the spreadsheet to users from your website, in which case you do almost nothing.
Edit: If your stakeholders really insist on using Excel server-side, I suggest you take a good hard look at Excel Services as #John Saunders suggests. It may not get you everything you want, but it'll get you quite a bit, and should solve some of the issues you'll end up with trying to do it server-side with ASP.NET.
That's not to say that it's a panacea; your mileage will certainly vary. And Sharepoint isn't exactly cheap to buy or maintain. In fact, short-term costs could easily be dwarfed by long-term costs if you go the Sharepoint route--but it might the best option to fit a requirement.
I still suggest you push back in favor of coding all of your logic in a separate .NET module. That way you can use it both server-side and client-side. Excel can easily pass calculations to a COM object, and you can very easily publish your .NET library as COM objects. In the end, you'd have a much more maintainable and usable architecture.
Neglecting the discussion whether it makes sense to manipulate an excel sheet on the server-side, one way to perform this would probably look like adopting the
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll
Using this library, you can tell Excel to open a Spreadsheet, change and read the contents from .NET. I have used the library in a WinForm application, and I guess that it can also be used from ASP.NET.
Still, consider the concurrency problems already mentioned... However, if the sheet is accessed unfrequently, why not...
The simplest way to do this might be to:
Upload the Excel workbook to Google Docs -- this is very clean, in my experience
Use the Google Spreadsheets Data API to update the data and return the numbers.
Here's a link to get you started on this, if you want to go that direction:
http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/overview.html
Let me be more adamant than others have been: do not use Excel server-side. It is intended to be used as a desktop application, meaning it is not intended to be used from random different threads, possibly multiple threads at a time. You're better off writing your own spreadsheet than trying to use Excel (or any other Office desktop product) form a server.
This is one of the reasons that Excel Services exists. A quick search on MSDN turned up this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/category/11361.aspx. That's a category list, so contains a list of blog posts on the subject. See also Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.WebServices Namespace.
It sounds like you're talking that the user has the spreadsheet open on their local system, and you want a web site to manipulate that local spreadsheet?
If that's the case, you can't really do that. Even Office automation won't help, unless you want to require them to upload the sheet to the server and download a new altered version.
What you can do is create a web service to do the calculations and add some vba or vsto code to the Excel sheet to talk to that service.
Due to a lack of response to my original question, probably due to poor wording on my part. Since then, I have thought about my original question and decided to reword it, hopefully for the better! :)
We create custom business software for our customers, and quite often they want attachments to be added to certain business entities. For example, they want to attach a Word document to a customer, or an image to a job. I'm curious as to how other are handling the following:
How the user attaches documents? Single attachment? Batch attachment?
How you display the attached
documents? Simple list? Detailed list?
And the killer question, how the
user then edits attached documents? Is this even possible in a web environment? Granted the user can just view the attachment.
Is there a good control library to help manage this process?
Our current development environment is ASP.NET and C#, but I don't think this is a pretty agnostic question when it comes to development tools, save for the fact I need to work in a web environment.
It seems we always run into problems with the customer and working with attachments in a web environment so I am looking for some successes that other programmers have had with their user base on how best to interact with attachments.
Start with one file upload control ("Browse button"), and use JavaScript to dynamically add more upload controls if they want to attach multiple files in a single batch.
Display them in a simple list format (Filename, type, size, date), but provide full details somewhere else if they want them.
If they want to edit the files, they have to download them, then re-upload them. Hence, you need a way that they can say "this attachment overrides that old attachment".
I'm not familiar with C# and ASP.NET, so I can't recommend any libraries that will help.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/uploader/
I'm thinking of starting a wiki, probably on a low cost LAMP hosting account. I'd like the option of exporting my content later in case I want to run it on IIS/ASP.NET down the line. I know in the weblog world, there's an open standard called BlogML which will let you export your blog content to an XML based format on one site and import it into another. Is there something similar with wikis?
The correct answer is ... "it depends".
It depends on which wiki you're using or planning to use. I've used various over the years MoinMoin was ok, used files rather than database, Ubuntu seem to like it. MediaWiki, everyone knows about and JAMWiki is a java clone(ish) of MediaWiki with the aim to be markup compatible with MediaWiki, both use databases and you can generally connect whichever database you want, JAMWiki is pre-configured to use an internal HSQLDB instance.
I recently converted about 80 pages from a MoinMoin wiki into JAMWiki pages and this was probably 90% handled by a tiny perl script I found somewhere (I'll provide a link if I can find it again). The other 10% was unfortunately a by-hand experience (they were of the utmost importance with them being recipies for the missus) ;-)
I also recently setup a Mediawiki instance for work and that took all of about 8 minutes to do. So that'd be my choice.
To answer your question I don't believe that there's such a standard as WikiML as Till called it.
As strange as it sounds, I've investigated screen scraping a wiki for a co-worker to help him port it to another wiki engine. It turned out that screen scraping would have been easier, quicker and more efficient to write to move this particular file based wiki to another one or a CMS.
Given the context that you wrote the question in I would bite the bullet now and pay the little extra for a windows hosted account and put Screwturn wiki on it. You're got the option of using file based or SQL Server based back end for it but because one of your requirements is low cost I'm guessing that you would use file based now for a cheaper hosted account and then you can always upscale the back end to SQL Server.
I haven't heard of WikiML.
I think your biggest obstacle is gonna be converting one wiki markup to another. For example, some wikis use markdown (which is what Stack Overflow uses), others use another markup syntax (e.g. BBCode, ...), etc.. The bottom line is - assuming the contents are databased it's not impossible to export and parse it to make it "fit" in another system. It might just be a pain in the ass.
And if the contents are not databased, it's gonna be a royal pain in the ass. :D
Another solution would be to stay with the same system. I am not sure what the reason is for changing the technology later on. It's not like a growing project requires IIS/ASP.NET all of the sudden. (It might just be the other way around.) But for example, if you could stick with PHP for a while, you could also run that on IIS.