Consuming Webhook payloads in Vue/Pinia in real time - ruby-on-rails

So, i'm relatively new to Vue, and I'm currently using it to build a small app that displays order data from Square's API.
I'm currently working on a stack that uses rails to make api calls using the square.rb gem. The frontend is entirely Vue which uses Pinia as a store, and there isnt going to be any kind of database behind this because reasons.
All data is provided directly via Square's API. I am currently polling to update order info, but my client wants to make this app truly real time, as it deals with food deliveries through ride-share companies and the purpose of this app is to show in real time statuses of orders for an in house screen at the restaurant.
Now Square has a webhook subscription service, and based on my reading it sounds like I can consume these to update my app, but there are a few logical leaps that I havent been able to make yet with how to get that data to the frontend of my app.
My questions are the following, with the intent being to connect the dots between the different technologies I might need to employ here to make this work. Kinda get a sense of what i'd need and where to link it up.
Can I use vue to consume webhook payloads directly and update through reactivity? That would be ideal, but I have found no docs yet that give me a good idea of whether thats possible.
If that is not possible, do I need to use some sort of socket connection (socket.io) to listen for these webhook updates?
If the current setup or proposed setup in the questions above is not feasible, what is a better solution for handling this while still using Vue?

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Need advice on syncing data between iOS devices in one app

I built an in-house app for selling tickets and checking-in students to our High School dances. At the moment the app can scan a QR code with the student's information and add their name to either a "Sales" list or "Check In" list. Then the app can export these lists to a CSV file and we compile all the data.
App works perfectly as expected. NOW I want to be able to sync data between multiple devices so that every device will see an up to date Sales and Check in list. The check in list is most important because then our faculty chaperones can all see who has arrived to the dance in real time. I figured I would need to build a server to hold all the data as opposed to on the individual devices like I am doing now (CoreData). Can anyone please give me guidance or advice as to where to go from here? I am using Swift and developing for iOS 10.
I would just answer the general approach to tackle this problem since the implementations would largely be depending on many factors (what database technology is available, the platform of the server, etc.)
You are absolutely right, you need a server to hold the data. Technically speaking, it is a database that holding the data. Thus, you need a database running on your server (there are tons of selections here: Maria DB, SQL Server, Mongo DB, etc.).
Next, you need to build a web service on top of the database so that the iOS app can interact with the database (add/delete/update/read rows). Web service is a very common layer in full-stack application since you normally don't access the database directly.
Finally, you need to guard your web service with some sort of authentication. I.e. you don't want any random person out there to be able to access your web service without permission. There are many implementations out there to secure your web service and you should be able to google that easily.
Firebase might be the easiest solution. Its pretty simple to setup, and its pretty simple to set up data persistence when you go off line. I'm big on trying to stick with the built in Apple services, but Firebase is hard to beat for simple apps.
Take a look at CloudKit, or perhaps Firebase or Azure, as services that will provide a back end server for you, and give you a tested SDK to build against.

Anonymous contact form iOS app

I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!

How to modify presence subscriptions workflow on ejabberd server?

I am developing something with ejabberd server. I came to the need of changing the subscription logic. I am using ejabberd-2.1.11
My need is on how the subscription works, I would like to change the logic so that users upload their roster contact with subscription both automatically and and save in in the rosterusers table-colum subscription immediately to be B. So that they should be able to see online and in their contacts at least when the first one has already registered to the server. ( hope this make sense for you and is valid)
I am a very beginner in erlang and ejabberd architecture but I have already developed some basic modules, my question to you is if you could help me on this regard, how difficult is to make this change and if you could give me some hints where the changes would be
I'd stay away from modifying the server, it conforms to standards and follows the specification. So if you ever need to move to another server or upgrade, you know it's just going to work.
What you would do to achieve this is implement this behavior on the client using the server's features.
If you are really sure you want to modify the server, mod_roster.erl is the file you want to be looking at.
If using an external DB, you can also modify the DB directly, but changes won't be reflected until the clients log back in.

Integrating twitter,facebook and other services in one single site

I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.

Searching for a song while using multiple API's

I'm going to attempt to create an open project which compares the most common MP3 download providers.
This will require a user to enter a track/album/artist name i.e. Deadmau5 this will then pull the relevant prices from the API's.
I have a few questions that some of you may have encountered before:
Should I have one server side page that requests all the data and it is all loaded simultaneously. If so, how would you deal with timeouts or any other problems that may arise. Or should the page load, then each price get pulled in one by one (ajax). What are your experiences when running a comparison check?
The main feature will to compare prices, but how can I be sure that the products are the same. I was thinking running time, track numbers but I would still have to set one source as my primary.
I'm making this a wiki, please add and edit any issues that you can think of.
Thanks for your help. Look out for a future blog!
I would check amazon first. they will give you a SKU (the barcode on the back of the album, I think amazon calls it an EAN) If the other providers use this, you can make sure they are looking at the right item.
I would cache all results into a database, and expire them after a reasonable time. This way when you get 100 requests for Britney Spears, you don't have to hammer the other sites and slow down your application.
You should also make sure you are multithreading whatever requests you are doing server side. Curl for instance allows you to pull multiple urls, and assigns a user defined callback. I'd have the callback send a some data so you can update your page with as the results come back. GETTUNES => curl callback returns some data for each url while connection is open that you parse it on the client side.

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