Deciding what data model to use for simple time tracking app - json

I’m creating an app that is very simple in terms of the data it needs to store but as I am brand new to app development I’m looking for advice on what is the best method to store/retrieve/change the data.
It’s a very simple time tracking app and will need to manipulate the following data.
A record for each new day. For each day record it will need to store
Start work time /date
Start lunch time /date
End lunch time /date End
work time /date
Working day /bool
As the app will be used in conjunction with an existing time tracking process there is no need to store the ‘day’ record for longer than 3 months.
I’ve looked through some ways of storing data.
UserDefaults
CoreData
A local JSON file
I’m leaning towards a local JSON but wondered if it’s worth looking at the other options even if it’s just to learn how they work? To keep things simple, I want to try to do as much as I can with just Swift and Swift UI as that’s all I’m familiar with.
Also I’d like the app to automatically create a new day record (at the point a new day occurs) without the user having to do anything. I’m not sure if that makes a difference with the data approach.
Any advice most welcome!

If storing data inside phone local is enough for you, I recommend you to learn and use CoreData to keep it persistent. I do not think local JSON file enough for your application it is hard to keep your application persistent. I do not know UserData but I think you are talking about UserDefaults and it is useful for keeping small amount of data like userSettings or app status. For the future needs, I strongly recommend you to learn some server-side like frameworks like Vapor (you can write your server-side code using Swift language that you can adapt easily) or any other server-side frameworks.

Related

Developing a A web-based real time dashboard

I want to consume kafka stream into mysql using Python; on top if which I want to build a realtime web based (web app) dashboard that will automatically be refreshed (ajax) on each data insert in the database.
After some searching, found a suggestion that ajax is not good for this purpose.
This post said websockets are better than ajax in terms of Performance.
Because I am not sure on whats the best way to achieve this So your expert advice is needed.
Thanks.
"I want to consume kafka stream into mysql using Python; on top if which I want to build a realtime web based (web app) dashboard that will automatically be refreshed (ajax) on each data insert in the database."
... (wince!) ...
Pretty-please find someone among your peers who can save you from yourself. (And is there any possible way that I can say this to you, such that you can "save face?" I can't think of any.) I'm not-at-all trying to have public fun at your expense. Please – "talk immediately to your manager. (S)He, surely, can help you."
I am certainly not an expert in this field, however my company uses Elastic/Kibana to read in from Kafka topics and display the data on a dashboard. This is just one of many routes you can take, but it works very well for us. You can read a little more into it here:
https://www.elastic.co/blog/just-enough-kafka-for-the-elastic-stack-part1

Creating a REST API for static hosting

I know this sounds crazy, but I had a thought and I was willing to try it out. I use GitLab pages for all my online projects, but a lot of them are ASP.NET MVC, which is an issue as I don't think you can run ASP.NET MVC sites on GitLab pages. I then thought, what if I make a site using something like angular or node.js, and have a central API for all my web projects? I thought that was a great idea, until I realized I couldn't use a database either. I guess what I'm asking is, would it be possible to create a REST API that uses JSON files for storage and node.js as the request pages, to create an API without a database?
Of course.
If you think about a database from the perspective of your application code, it is basically just a place to store and retrieve data.
Imagine the database library you are using has two simple methods, store and retrieve. In your application code, you could write db.store('here is the item') and the later on, db.retrieve().
However, those store and retrieve methods could be implemented in many different ways to provide the same effective behavior from the perspective of your application. Some examples:
Send/query the data to/from an external data store, such as PostgreSQL
Write it to a file on disk and read it back later
Store the data in memory
Make HTTP requests to an external system to store the data
Some of these options will be more or less appropriate depending on your exact requirements, however, the general idea is that given a database API, you could implement the exact same method signatures with a completely different approach.

How do you incorporate Node.js/passport into my website?

I'm new to webdev and I'm trying to use passport for registration/authentication on a site I'm setting up. I'm also going to write an application in node later on that will be using some of the user data (users will need to provide an API key for an account on another site that I will use to pull data into the application).
At the moment, the main issue I'm having is figuring out what goes where. I've found plenty of resources that explain how to create an app using passport, but nothing shows how it would be incorporated into your website or where the files should be in relation to your website. I'm relatively new to Node.js, and while I've written a few small applications I have never hosted them anywhere.
Bonus question: I'm using MongoDB with passport and I was also planning to use it to store some JSON my application will be receiving from API calls. However, I wanted to use MySQL to store some data as well. More specifically, I'm planning to save the raw JSON then I'll create a relational database out of the data I need from the JSON and then keep the rest in MongoDB for easy access. Is this common/smart, or should I focus on keeping everything in my MongoDB? I'm relatively new to NoSQL.
Thanks in advance for any help.
I would reference this tutorial. I just recently used this to help myself with a new application. Also there is an example of the same thing but in SQL here. So not sure what you mean by " where the files should be in relation to your website". The information related to to authentication should go in your database.
To your "bonus question" you can use two databases. The key here is to ask yourself why and what are the true needs for data, and how is this data accessed and used. From ground up I would like one and stick with it. If at some point later you realize a certain type of data would be better in a different database then you can add it.
Side note: look into an IDE such as webstorm to help you out.

How do I set up the architecture for a "big data" analysis project?

A friend of mine and I are in our senior year and will be starting a senior project soon. We had the idea to do a data analysis and data visualization project for it. Our project involves reading a CSV file that is updated every 2 minutes, parsing that data, then storing it in a database. Once that data is stored we want to run some analysis on it and provide an API through which we could access that data to visualize in some way. Our end goal would be to build an Android app that displays some of the raw data from the CSV and the analysis in a user friendly format. I talked to another CS Major and he explained that I would need a few different servers to accomplish this: One for the storage, another for analysis, and another for some type of queue that would make sure things don't get screwy while we are doing scraping and analysis. The problem is, I don't really know where to start with this. I've done some work with a SQL database before and a PHP front end, but nothing with multiple servers. I've heard of tools to use with big data projects like Hadoop but i'm not exactly sure where it fits in. If someone could point me to a resource of some kind to explain, or explain themselves, how I would start to structure this kind of project, that would be awesome!
Since you don't have much experience with these things you'll probably want to look at projects like Cloudera. Specifically their resources page has a nice set of videos and articles.
Another source of solid information (that I personally use) is by clicking on an Stack Overflow tag and selecting the votes option. Many good questions on a plethora of big data topics already exists.

Ruby on Rails - Database or excel

I am currently doing a project in Ruby on Rails and I have been presented with a dilemma.
The dilemma is that the users of my system will be uploading an excel spreadsheet. The issue is should I just read straight from this excel spreadsheet into my front-end or should I load this spreadsheet into my MySQL database and then to my front-end.
I have asked numerous people about this issue and have researched on-line to no avail.
Any help would be much appreciated.
The Excel file is not a database. If you need to allow it as source input, parse it, copy the data into a real database and connect to it.
The database is more flexible and efficient for querying and processing information.
I can think of two benefits, or rather options, of having them upload the excel spreadsheet for processing by your back end.
1) would be for your tracking purposes (who sent what and here is what the back-end did with it...). In fact consider that other formats/versions could be introduced, would it be important to keep them to identify what went wrong? "How can we handle this new format"?
2) On the other side, the front-end way that is, you offload processing from the back-end, but that means that the browser app could get fairly complex and depending on your excel, that is if it has many relationships, sending that data up to the server could be complex. However if is simply a flat spreadsheet, say simple rows without totals/tax calc/..., then it might be an advantage of loading it into the browser and then sending these rows up to the server if offloading processing is of any importance.
However point 2 really is diluted by point 1, which to me would be of greater importance for future migration of this service. So I personally would choose uploading it and processing on the back end.
Update
As you clarified in the comments, if you are asking about the use of Excel on the backend as a database? I would agree with Simone Carletti's answer here. Maybe just add a real database gives you much more flexibility, more tools and, more performance. This difference is loading a file, parsing it into some structure, then saving it (unless you are using some .NET framework and even if, the Database (MySQL, MongoDB...) would give you much more flexibility in structuring and querying, over the headache of managing with the speed of DB connections. You might just want to write a sample in both to evaluate, the DB solution will probably win you over.