I plan to deploy my Flex Application on the web using MS Azure. Has anyone done this?
If yes, can you please provide pointers, reference links etc?
Regards
Aparna
As far as Azure is concerned, your swfs are just resources so your'e basically looking at a regular though pimped ISP. The interesting possibility is connecting it to Azure backend, possibly with SQL Azure.
As far as I can see. FluorineFX should work there as well.
If it's only the static content, html/swf/... then I suggest you use blob storage to put them in instead of using compute power of several instances as these are not needed. This will cut down on your costs as blob storage is publicly accessible but is very cheap.
If your Flex application needs integration with services then you need to host them in a compute environment like an instance.
Related
I'm using Python and QT (PySide) in a local application (which connect to a database on cloud Azure).
Now, my objective is moving this app on the web, in particular on Azure (I have an Azure subscription), simply transfering it on Azure, it's possible in some manner? I have not found examples on the web.
The important question is: is Python QT (app web) compatible with Azure?
Thanks
UPDATED ANSWER!
Yes, now you can. Well sort of. The mad mads at Digia have created something called "QT for Web Assembly" that can compile your whole app into something that runs embedded into a web page.
https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-setup-webassembly.html
You might have to rethink connecting directly to the database however, as thats simply not gonna fly with web-sockets (And honestly direct app to remote RDBMS has never been a smart move. Theres a LOT of things that can go wrong letting the internet connnect to your databaes). But you could at least keep the UI and rewrite the databaes layer to interogate something like a GraphQL (or whatever) front end to the data.
OLD ANSWER
I'm afraid your up for a nearly complete rewrite. QT is a desktop/mobile platform. It doesn't go anywhere near HTML/CSS except perhaps for displaying them in a webview component. Azure or AWS won't magically make it into a web application for you.
Your code as it stands needd to be rewritten in a web-first transactional manner. That is it takes a request, processes it, produces a result. To some extent websockets has changed this dynamic for a limited subset of use cases where interaction needs to be non transactional, and modern web app design hides much of the transactionality behind a web-services model, but 90% of web work is still very much transactional.
Database <---> Web server/Web app stack <--- Internet! --> Web browser
My suggestion is to pick up Django (or one of the other systems. If its just simple, Flask is another good alternative. Flask for simple apps, Django for the big stuff. Or use something else, you have choices here!, and start from scratch. Analyse your products function and start mapping out how to make this work as a database driven transactional system.
Theres no shortcuts here, I'm afraid.
Good day.
I'm wondering if the Enterprise Library Caching using isolated storage (disk, not DB) can be accessed by multiple apps in IIS? That is , can they all share the same instance of it.
I have various WCF services running on one machine, set up in different web apps (and potentially in different app pools, if that makes a difference). They all need access to a shared cache.
I had been told that this is possible with EntLib, but after doing some reading I'm not entirely sure this is the case. All of the services are running under NETWORK SERVICE user, but since they are all different apps in IIS does this prevent the sharing? I know having a different user certainly would.
So, can the same user use the same cache across multiple apps, or is it limited to within one app?
Any guidance would be appreciated!
If you want to share your cache across several services it would be better to go with App Fabric caching. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/ee695849.aspx
I ended up not using EntLib for this and just used isolated storage.
In case anybody has the same problem, you can see the following question where I posted the code I used, as well as an issue I hit while using it plus the resolution.
Can't share isolated storage file between applications in different app pools
I've got asp.net project. I want publish it in azure platform. My project contains different static content: images, javascript, css, html pages and so on. I want store this content in azure blob storage. So, my questions are:
1) Is there any way to automate the process of migration this content from my application to blob storage?
2) How can I use data retreived from blob storage? Any examples would be great!
Best regards,
Alexander
First off, what you're trying to do could create cross-site scripting (they'll be on different domain names) or security issues (if you're using SSL). So make sure you really want to seperate the static files from the rest of your web site.
That said, the simpliest approach would be to use any one of a number of Windows Azure Storage management utilities (Storage Explorer or Cerebrata's Storage Studio would both work), to upload the static content to a Windows Azure Storage blob container. Then set the permissions on that container to publis read so that anyone with a web browser can access the contents of the container.
Finally, change all referrences to the content to point to the new URI's in blob storage and deploy your ASP.NET web role.
Again though, if I were you, I'd really look at what you're trying to accomplish with this approach. By putting it in blob storage, you do gain access to a few things (like CDN enablement), but as a trade-off, you lose control over many others (like simplified access control via IIS for request logs to tell when someone is downloading your image files a trillion times to try and run up your bill). So unless there's a solid NEED for this, I'd generally recommend against it.
Adding a bit to #Brent's answer: you'll get a few more benefits when offloading static content to blob storage, such as reduction in load against your Web Role instances.
I wrote up a more detailed answer on this similar StackOverflow question.
In light of your comment to Brent, you may want to consider uploading the content into Blob storage and then proxying it through a WebRole. You can use something like an HttpModule to accomplish that fairly seamlessly.
This has 2 main advantages:
You can add/modify files without reloading your web roles or losing them on role refresh.
If you're migrating a site, the files can stay at the same URLs they were pre-migration.
The disadvantages:
You're paying the monetary cost for Blob accesses and the performance cost to your web roles.
You can't use the Azure CDN.
Blob storage is generally slower (higher latency) than disk access.
I've got a fairly simple module I wrote to do exactly this. I haven't gotten around to posting it anywhere public, but if you're going to do this I can send you the code or something.
I have a situation where information about a user is stored in the web application cache and when that information is updated in one application - I want to notify the other applications (running on the same machine) that the data should be removed from it's cache so it can be refreshed. Basically I need to keep cached data in sync across multiple asp.net applications.
I have started down the path of using a central web service to help coordinate the notifcations but it is turning out to be more complex than I think it needs to be.
Is there a way that one asp.net application can easily reach across to another on the same box to clear an item from the cache?
Is there a better way to achieve shared cached information than using the application cache?
I really want to create a way for apps to communicate in a loosely coupled way - I looked at nservice bus but the dependency on MSMQ scared me away - my client has had bad experiences with MSMQ and does not want to support an app that requires it.
Suggestions?
Michael
I agree with Hogan. Best is to use a shared database. I want to add to that that, when using SQL Server, you can use SQL Cache Dependency. This SQL Server mechanism allows notifications to applications in such a way that used caches can be invalided directly after a change is made to the data.
A shared database is probably going to cause you the least pain.
Edit
Note: ASP.NET allows you to make "cache clearing" triggers on SQL server changes. Should be a quick search in the cache examples on MSDN to find some examples. Thus when the user info stored in the cache changes in the DB the local cache copy will clear and be re-loaded from the DB.
There are commercial distributed caches available for .net other than Microsoft Velocity - NCache, Coherence, etc.
How about Velocity? It's a distributed cache that works between servers as well as between applications. It has PowerShell management and all sorts of documentation to get you going faster and be far more maintainable in the long-term.
What about COM/DCOM, using namespace System.Runtime.Remoting
The current application is a kind of CRM application built upon MS Access. The application is for internal use. My job is to migrate it to ASP.NET web-based application. Now boss requires to keep Access as database and develop ASP.NET code against it.
My question is, is there any disadvantages of using Access as database in ASP.NET application? (e.g. optimistic concurrency issue?) Should I persuade boss to upgrade Access to MS-SQL?
Many thanks!
We've used Access as a backend for web sites with good success. It's cheap, can be used effectively by moderately skilled programmers, and you can store the MDB on a document server so it gets backed up.
Most IT people dislike Access, but from a business perspective, Access can be very valuable.
MS Access is notoriously unstable in multiuser environments. A WEB app is by definition heavily multi-user.
So IMHO leaving MS Access as underlying DB is a call for trouble. At least use SQL Express (it is free)
The problem you are going to face in upgrading from Access to MS-SQL is that there is a major cost investment for the application. If your company already has the infrastructure in place(licensing, hardware...) then you won't have such a hard fight to pursuade your boss.
As for a technical answer:
I'd say you need to let you boss know that access databases aren't ideal for concurrent usage which a web application suggests is the intended goal of the application. My view is that Access is for database information that a SMALL set of users will be simply using for small data entry and querying. NEVER use Access to build an enterprise-level solution.
If you are planning to upgrade a Microsoft Access database to SQL Server 2008, use the SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) rather than the upsizing wizard built into MS
10+ tips for upsizing an Access database to SQL ServerAccess.
Your boss probably likes to do ad-hoc stuff with access / excel. If you move the DB to SQL Server Express you can use Access and it's linked table feature to let your boss keep doing his ad-hoc needs through Access while keeping the data in SQL Server Express. If you keep the linked tables named the same as the old physical ones all his reports and queries will should keep working.
I'm an Access promoter, but not for use on websites because Jet/ACE is not threadsafe (though Michael Kaplan once said that is is threadsafe if you access it via ADO/OLEDB; I don't quite understand how a database abstraction layer can wash away a characteristic of the underlying database engine it's calling, but if MichKa said, it's 99% likely to be true).
Now, the exceptions would be if you're using it for prototyping something that will use a different database, or if it's read-only, or is read-write but will only ever have a very small number of users.
Michael Kaplan's website, trigeminal.com, used to use a Jet database as the back end (it may still -- I don't know that MichKa ever changed it), and when that was his main website he reported getting 100K hits a day. But it's a read-only site, so fits my restrictions.
There are so many different alternatives and they are mostly easy to use that I just don't see the point of trying to use Jet/ACE as back end for a website. I'd never do it myself (all the websites I'm responsible for use MySQL).
Simply put, go with MSSQL. Express edition is free, and will give you everything you need to migrate away from Access. These articles are talking about Access applications specifically, but the same issues will plague you.
http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39285074,00.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://techrepublic%2ecom%2ecom/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=205509&messageID=2136367