I'm new to AWS, and I need a little help choosing the proper architecture from the seemingly endless array of services. Can anyone give me a suggestion?
Basically, I'm trying to replace an old PHP server that does the following:
Reads XML from a URL. (it's data about rental properties)
Transforms the XML into HTML, reordering and adding a bit of styling via CSS.
Serves the HTML through Apache. (My customer has a self-designed Wix site that shows these results in an iframe.) I cache the HTML for 12 hours at a time, so that I'm not hammering the XML host in #1 more than twice/day.
What would be a simple way to replicate this simple parse/cache/serve setup in AWS? The data being parsed and served is very small, btw - up to 100 MB per day.
Edit: I'm not looking to keep the old PHP code. Any mainstream language should be fine.
If you want to use PHP then you could move your service to an EC2 server with few if any changes required to your code. You could also use Elastic Beanstalk for this which manages many of the AWS services for you, including the EC2 server.
Amazon also recently released the Lightsail service, which is similar to a VPS service and would definitely be easier to get started with than EC2.
If you are OK rewriting the code and are interested in a "serverless" model which might save you lots of money over a traditional server hosting model, you could look into AWS Lambda. Lambda doesn't currently support PHP, so you would have to rewrite your code in one of the languages it does support (Python, NodeJS, Java or C#).
Related
Is it possible to build a realtime app using AngularJs with a mysql database?
I've been reading thousands of tutorials, but they are all focused on express, nodejs, etc.. didn't found any documentation on wheter it's possible or not. I tried to take a look at the socket.io docs, but still didn't found anything relevant to this question.
I didn't tried anything yet because of this. I use a webApp based on AngularJs on a apache server (local).
Where should i start to be able to build a real time app using these tools i have?
Do i really need to use a node/express server?
What are the main consideration i need to do before taking this step?
Is there any documentation i should read?
I need to do this real time because it involves product orders, call center, ticket system, etc.. So everytime there is a new ticket is opened/changed, new order arrives, etc.. I need to make the user aware of this, without the need to refresh the page.
Or if someone could give me a further explanation of this concept and how to get started, it will be great.
You can run angular on top of any backend, although most examples push towards REST. If you want your app to feel like a real time application, using WebSockets is a likely improvement.
WebSockets play nice with Angular, look at https://github.com/wilk/ng-websocket for example. A back-end in Node will work, but many other backend techs will do equally well.
Here is a decent tutorial using MySQL, NodeJS, and Angular: https://codeforgeek.com/2015/03/real-time-app-socket-io/
I recommend that you keep using a webserver like Apache (my personal preference is Nginx). You can proxy API and socket requests to Node, and serve static resources for the app from a folder.
Check out https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_proxy_wstunnel.html if you stay with Apache. Check out http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/websocket.html is you go for nginx.
Without a webserver, you'll have to either:
serve your static resources with Node (polluting your server project with client code), or
work with different ports, risking the app becomes unusable in client environments, or
work with different domains, giving you a CORS head-ache.
Although I don't have much experience with Node, MySQL with Node.js should help you out a bit.
You'll want to move away from Apache if you want to do websocket stuff with Socket.io
Yes, it is possible to create a software with AngularJS in the front end and any other server side language that speaks to MySQL. Few months back I worked on a software with Java Spring Framework in the backend with MySQL database and AngularJS with bootstrap in the front end. You could start by following the MVC pattern, where your views can be served as AngularJS and your Controller can be in any server side code, with MySQL database.
I've been running in circles looking for a way to deliver data from a proprietary flat file database (based on the ProvideX platform) to a client-thick web application that makes RESTful requests and expects JSON responses.
ProvideX and Sage MAS 90 provided an ODBC driver that works for pulling tables, but I can't think of a good way to connect the dots without needing to program a bunch of server-side code.
Before I go down the path of programming custom server-side middleware, does anyone have any bright ideas, (or obvious ideas that I have overlooked)?
I am not locked into any particular architecture at the moment because we are hashing out requirements for the web application, so any ideas would be helpful.
ProvideX/Sage provides a web services module, but I can't use it because my company has refused to invest in the software module and upgrade costs. Let's not let that be a distraction, however, because I am still looking for a way to use the ODBC driver in this question thread.
ODBC-ODBC Bridges exist but all the ones I know are commercial.
I have a client who wants a control panel for the app I am developing them. The control panel is a Mac OSX application that allows the user to submit files (excel docs and such) to my MySQL database. Those files are then checked by the iOS app I have created for them.
I have no idea how to do this. I have the MySQL database all set up, and I have looked everywhere for a solution. Any help is appreciated.
I wouldn't try to connect to your MySQL database directly from your cell phone. It's a bad design for several reasons. Instead build a API on the same server as the MySQL database. It doesn't matter if you do it in java, php, c# or anything else. You might even find some product or open source project that can do this automatically. I've listed some benefits of doing it this way
It makes testing easier. You can write a test framework against your API that doesn't rely on or is using a phone.
It makes development faster. You don't need to emulate or use a phone to develop and test your table design and queries.
It gives you compatibility. When you need to change your database (and you do) you can create new APIs that the new version of the app uses while and old version still out there can continue to use the old API (that you might have to modify to still provide the same functionallity)
It gives you flexibility. If your user base grows and you might need to have replication for reads or sharded databases you build that into the API instead of into the app which is just a better way to do it.
One option would be to use PHP to handle all the database interaction.
Host the scripts on the server and just have the apps call them and get the scripts to return some sort of parseable response (I'd go for JSON).
I have never found a suitable Object-C based connector for MySQL. At this point I would suggest using a C/C++ connector. There's lots of examples of how to configure the connector for both C and C++. The hard part will be all of the data passed from the MySQL code and the Object-C code will that it will have to be in C types.
EDIT: An Example
Back in the MSSQL 2000 timeline, there was an IIS integration layer that allowed HTTP GET commands to make select statements, and there were other SqlXml niceties that worked (not that fast or well but they worked) out of the box. I gave a chance to expose database stuff fairly quickly.
What is the comparable technology for MSSQL 2008/2012? I saw slashDb (http://www.slashdb.com/) and it seems to do that, but I am trying to understand the other options out there. Just SQL Server crud and sproc access.
Thanks.
Yes, SlashDB does exactly that and more. Full disclosure: I am the founder and CEO.
Once SlashDB is installed you would use its web interface to connect it with your database. Depending which database login and database schema you use for that connection, you will have the tables and views from that schema turned into of URL endpoints.
Those URLs can be followed in the browser but they are also API endpoints in JSON, XML or CSV. It works for reading and writing (you can control that in user configuration).
In addition to that you can define a set of parameterized SQL queries. Each query is given a name and instantly becomes an API endpoint too.
In order to help you getting started easily SlashDB is available on AWS and Azure marketplaces, as a Docker container from DockerHub, pre-built virtual machines or as .rpm and .deb packages for installation directly on Linux.
For more technical info please visit: https://docs.slashdb.com
The nearest equivalent may be SOAP/HTTP endpoints, however Microsoft has deprecated them for various reasons and recommends WCF or ASP.NET instead. Although the simplest way to get a quick CRUD setup is probably to use a framework or ORM that generates it for you, like LINQ to SQL or whatever else suits your needs.
A customer of mine asked me a better and faster solution to update it's real estate web site as he and his employees don't want to connect to the web site and update one by one the ads as they don't want to loose time waiting the normal latency of the internet.
I firstly solved the issue by building a PHP script that imported an Excel file into the web site's MySQL database and it worked greatly. But the problem were pictures that have still to be uploaded separately. I then wrote a PHP script that uploaded the pictures using ajax and drag&drop so the user could select multiple pictures and upload them at once. And this worked too, but the customer is still not completely satisfied as he says this solution is quite 'patched'.
I then thought about a desktop application - a kind of local database (could be SQLite) - that the user keeps updated locally and only at the end of the day the app connects to the remote server and updates the db and uploads the pictures.
My question is: what EASY desktop high level programming language I could use to do the job? Do you know any RAD (visual IDE) programming language able to connect to a remote mySQL server and upload data via a simple custom GUI?
I tried RealBasic and PureBasic but I did not work it out. I thought about building the app in PHP and then convert it to EXE but I did not tried yet.
Please don't suggest me Java, C or Delphy as I'm looking for something very easy.
Thank you
Have you considered a client side javascript/html app that syncs with the server, since you're already familiar with the platform? If one browser better supports what you want to do (Firefox has some extension perhaps vs Chrome, or whatever), than mandate that to run this app (rather than worrying about being portable across browsers).
All of the browsers can have client side storage now, and you can just do things locally, and finally push them to the server "all at once".
If your client is using a Windows platform, you could use IronPython (.NET), VB.NET, or C#. These all allow you to create windows/forms visually in Visual Studio. If you're not already familiar with the .NET platform I'm not sure how 'easy' this will be, but I think that's going to be true for most other platforms as well.
That being said, it sounds like your existing solution is probably the best idea - perhaps if you can make your solution feel less like a "patch" they will be satisfied.
No reason you can't use Purebasic if that's what you're comfortable with. There are HTTP file upload examples on the PB forums.
I've used Purebasic for years but I'd recommend spending the time to get to know C#/.NET - it's a world of difference and once you learn it stuff like this is pretty easy.