I have a web app, to which I need to add a web based dashboard, which will be updated periodically from a mysql database which aggregates the statistics to be viewed.
I'm looking for any easy to use and design framework, which will smoothly deploy into our web apps (in many different installations), which will look great, be free (or almost free).
Thought about BIRT, but I assume there are more up to date solutions. Any recommendations?
Try bootstrap. Its neat with admin consoles and charts.
Related
I wanted to use my xampp local server with my friend so that we can make database together as a team. How to do this?
Like we have google words, github for codes pushing and writing etc.
I know purchased website have integrated database management but, I am not purchasing any one.
I search on google but out of luck.
Unless you're doing performance testing, the free tier offered by most cloud providers should be sufficient, however you really need to run this on Linux with VPN access.
But if you're doing collaborative development work you REALLY need to be using version control. That includes use for your DDL. Exending that to your test data should be trivial.
At first, this question appeared to be too trivial to me to actually require a Stackoverflow post. However, after executing many Google searches for the information, I am at a lost when trying to figure this out about Couchbase.
In Couchbase (I am using the 2.2 Community version), how do I share views among developers? Is there some sort if import/export functionality available? If not, then how does Couchbase intend for developers to share the views that they are using without needing to do manual copying/pasting? It is obvious that the code that a development team would write for querying Couchbase will require accurate view names. Without having a way to send a developer a view file, to accurately setup a Couchbase DB, how can it even be possible to develop with Couchbase locally as a team?
I'm sorry if I sound a little desperate or harsh here, but if it isn't possible to share views among multiple developers, then I don't see how Couchbase can be a viable DB solution for a team of developers trying to share database configuration, similar to how a team using an SQL DB would share schema files to set up the DB.
Several ways you can approach this:
1) Create views programmatically as demonstrated here in java:
http://tugdualgrall.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/couchbase-101-create-views-mapreduce.html
or here in node.js:
http://www.tuicool.com/articles/RvYbQn
2) Store all your views in your version control system (This is the option I use). If you are developing locally then only you need your personal view code, once they are working and your tests are all passing then you can check them in.
I assume you'd then be developing on an testing environment so yes sadly here you'd have to update the views either by hand or by using option 1.
You could also take a look at perhaps using this tool but only for views: http://www.couchbase.com/communities/q-and-a/how-bulk-import-design-docs-and-views-couchbase-server
This functionality currently is not available in the admin UI.
There is a defect/enhancement open Ability to import/export views MB-8436. You can leave there your feedback and vote for it so it will be included in the next release.
In the meantime you can use Design Document REST API
Also there is a workaround blog
I was hoping someone could help me answer a couple of questions regarding Tableau. I am not as familiar with the platform, but I have a client who is looking for a reporting/analytics/data visualization platform that they could use for many of the internal apps (for their employees) and external (customer facing internet with login) applications.
The driver is that each of their internal teams has used many disparate technologies such as SSRS, Crystal, custom ASP.NET controls (Kendo/Telerik, etc), but now they have the opportunity to choose a common platform that could serve most/all of the future reporting and data visualization needs for enterprise and customer facing solutions.
They are looking for a platform that provides everything from simple grids with basic filter/sort/group, all the way to rich charting and ad-hoc reporting with slicing and dicing of data.
They will not always be creating dashboards in these apps since they are customer-facing, but they may want to have dashboards for internal (intranet) apps. They will definitely want the ability to build true internal BI dashboards to report on data from all these online apps across all customers, to whom they provide their SaaS/customer-facing web apps.
One of our main concerns revolves around security of data, as some of these customer-facing web apps are multi-tenant, so we'd need to ensure that data is always filtered by the client tenant id. Also we have a very customized security model, with data driven roles, permissions that may prevent showing certain types of data (e.g. SSN, Salary, etc) etc.
Does Tableau fits this model, can it meet most/all of these requirements, or is it meant more for internal data?
It should be quite possible by setting up a reverse proxy that would front end your multi tenant web application. There is a document on how to setup Apache as reverse proxy with Tableau with/without SSL.
I am familiar with how to configure Apache as reverse proxy and so here are the details with Apache Web server on how to setup reverse proxy rules.
There may be some documentation for front ending with IIS/Nginx so you should do some googling by yourself.
You need to harden your webserver configuration by limiting access from the external firewall to read only pages and the internal user can access allpages. Since you mentioned that the external users are allowed access to readonly pages, I presume all the requests from external requests will be only GET requests and a few PUT/POST requests when users choose to use filters. So you can block external users from any request except GET. Exceptions should be made for the pages that allow applying filters and grouping.
In your mutitenant application make sure you refer to the tableau URL's by the apache server url that is exposed to the outside world. If any url not configured in apache is used, users will recieve a access denied error. You need to create a role that has readonly access to tableau pages for external users. To address mulitenancy you need to set a cookie or something to identify the tenant and something similar to identify the user. To filter SSN and some more information you can use mod_proxy_html which filters content. You can also use mod_security module of Apache to block SSNs and Credit Card Numbers.
References:
Configuring Apache Server as Proxy with Tableau
Apache mod Proxy documentation
Blocking POST requests
mod_security FAQs
Yes to most of your questions -- with just a little fine print.
First remember Tableau is primarily about visualizing data, so it is great for publishing readonly interactive views of data. If you want allow end users to edit data, you'll have to do that by another means. Fortunately, the Tableau JavaScript API lets you interact closely with Tableau with your custom Javascript code. So if your needs are mostly about visualization, but want want to be able to trigger some custom code to modify data in some of your apps, you should be fine. But Tableau is not designed for creating custom CRUD apps as a rule.
The great thing about Tableau server is that many people can learn to use it and publish their own visualizations -- even if they don't know how to program. That doesn't mean they will win visualization design awards the first time, or that they shouldn't learn something about how databases work if they want have good performance. But it does mean the people that know their data best can learn to design and publish their own visualizations without having to wait three months on a backlog queue so the one IT guy can change the color of a button or add a field. It still would be good to get good system, database and visualization folks to help train, organize data, set governance and security rules, optimize, etc, but business users can learn to be the ones with hands on control over how their information is presented. That's a good thing.
The security question has several moving parts, and usually there are usually good answers from Tableau depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Tableau server does support multi-tenancy using sites. There is fairly flexible permissions and group policy system. It can use SAML for authentication, and has several features providing access to specific to the user/tenant. It works with almost every database, and you can in some cases push your security enforcement to the database server -- SQL server for instance. There is a trusted ticket feature where you can defer some authorization decisions to another server, say a web portal server. Useful when Tableau visualizations are embedded in some other web page.
Most security use cases can be supported out of the box, but there are some complex custom access control situations that are tricky to implement currently in Tableau server. Nothing you've listed sounds out of the normal swim lane, but the only way to know whether your security model is too complex is to dive into the details. Hopefully they will release a custom access control API for users who want to extend it.
At the high level, you sure can use Tableau to build customer-facing dashboards. You can quickly build and deploy those and as others mentioned, you can iFrame them with Javascript APIs, you can customize most of it. But it doesn't provide complete flexibility for user interaction, which you can if you use other technologies. Other options include hand coding framework and then using charting applications.
For simple dashboards, Tableau would be the obvious choice if you have already bought core-licenses. But when looking at what's going on in the industry, Tableau will not be able to fulfill all needs.
If using Tableau
1. Building Charts/Tables/Visualization is a super simple, efficient way.
2. You can expose low grained data to customers, because of Tableau's propitiatory columnar database engine, you can potentially expose millions of records via a dashboard.
3. You can use Tableau's security and access control mechanism.
4. As other user mentioned, you can use trusted ticketing mechanism to integrate easily with other applications (portals etc).
Challenges with Tableau approach.
1. If you have late arriving transactions (in Internet world it's so common to mark a click as fraudulent after few days) with late arriving transactions, you have to have full refresh the extracts, which means if you are showing say 13 months worth of data, you have refresh it all, all the time. Now with bigData, business needs all data all the time, which means you would end up extracting millions of records, throughout the day.
2. Very little flexibility in user interactions, like menus,drop downs etc. you have to work with what's been provided by Tableau.
3. If you have multiple charts on same dashboard page, not so user friendly way to download underlying data.
4. Many other challenges, in laying out visualizations on dashboard page, as there is no easy way to control canvas with pixel control, white spaces etc.
You should be very careful, after analyzing your use case, whether Tableau would be the right product before you invest in it.
Tableau's primary power comes from its desktop tool for data visualization/exploration and not from pre-built dashboards.
Best of luck.
Since Tableau public is also based on Tableau, I assume that you can put your dashboards in public using your own Tableau infrastructure.
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.
Let us say I want a "hello world" program to be run in the server, but many number of clients can execute the program whenever they want.
An example of this kind of applications based on which I am asking the question is
google docs
If the application is simple, then there's no special principle. As an example, since we're talking about Google, let's look at their main entry page. Ignoring the menu links, it's a basic web page that uses HTML to post the search terms to a back end server application that performs the search. Literally thousands of users can use this web page at the same time.
The more users, the more web servers running your web page you'll need.
If the application is more complicated, like Google Docs, then you have to figure out a way for each user of the application to save information separately and securely. You'd probably start with a user id.
The more users, the more disk storage you'll need. System managed storage would be helpful.
As far as software, you can use any language you wish to develop the application. JQuery is popular. There's Java EE, Ruby, .NET, and a host of other languages. You have the choices of MySQL, Oracle, or DB2 for a relational database.