I wanted to learn how to use Zapier both personally and to provide clients with better support/information. Do you have any recommendations as to where to start? I looked on gitbook but could only find a sales pitch slide deck.
Thnx!
This isn't the best place for what you are trying to do, with that said your question may get removed but at the very least I can get you in the right direction.
Zapier Support Docs are useful for general knowledge.
Zapier also is really great about replying to questions (I've done it alot).
Stack Overflow is best for when you are stuck (especially with code).
How to get started:
First learn how to make some simple zaps, just login and open up the console to do something simple like 'New Google Sheet Row when New Gmail Message'. Then learn to use the Zapier Dev Tools. The Dev tools are what people struggle with as you are coding an API with node.js (the UI interface uses JavaScript which is easier to start with). So what you will need to do is create a successful connection and test it out. Here is a simple tutorial.
Learn by doing, and when you get stuck, come here and we can give you a hand.
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I am looking for advice to save me time. I am planning to create a Q&A web app for my university, a stackoverflow clone. I know Rails and I know Angular but I never used them together. One option for me is to use Firebase APIs because it's simple. My question is which is easier, making Angular consume Rails APIs, or firebase APIs? Or is it the same steps no matter what I use to create the APIs ?
This is not going to be the same process. It's also not a direct comparison.
Firebase is a hosted third party 'backend-as-a-service' and you use what they give you for API calls, but you can more or less rely on the API working as advertised (though the docs can be less than useful in places).
That is vs building your own RoR API, which means just that - you pick the groceries just as you want them, but you also get to fix all the bugs on both your API and and your client. You also still need a DB selected.
A more direct comparison would be 'should I pick Node or RoR.' Your question as it's posed is really a question of your own backend implementation or a hosted package.
Which is easier?
There is not a real, single answer.
If by easier you mean 'most direct', Firebase has an Angular library called AngularFire. It translates a lot of Firebase paradigms into a pretty familiar Angular pattern, with a couple of nice extras. You focus on your client code and DB design, it handles the server operations. That seems fairly direct to me.
If by easier you mean 'most flexibility', it's hard to see how building your own doesn't give you that.
If by easier you mean 'less work for me', then 'it depends'. If you are comfortable writing RoR backends and less familiar with NoSQL patterns, then you can probably put it together faster on your own setting your API methods and selecting a DB you are comfortable with. If you feel stronger with Angular than RoR, then learning Firebase paradigms might be a shorter climb.
For what it's worth, given its limited set of API calls, there is probably more focused support for specific questions about Firebase. But you do sacrifice the option of doing it 'your way,' and the RoR community is far larger than Firebase's so you can probably still get plenty of help. Like I said, it can really depend.
Simple question - I have dabbled with the awesome scribe library before but am now thinking of committing to this for an oauth-dependent production grails app. Is there enough community support to keep this library going with all the API changes the likes of Facebook seem to be doing these days? I'd hate to have to revert to something spring security for oauth but, in the same sentence, would not want to have to keep customising scribe for my own once API changes are released by providers.
I ask this because the core code (which is probably perfectly fine at the moment) is about 4 years old. Is this project here to stay?
With the exception of hearing from the Scribe team it's nearly impossible to answer this question with a simple yes/no.
However, I think it's better to look at it from this perspective to arrive at a valid answer.
Does it meet your needs today?
Do you have access to the source code?
Does it have an active community?
Do you have other options if you need to replace it in the future?
Should you need to, can you modify the source to meet your own needs in the future?
Given the fact you do have access to the source, and you do have other options I'd say it doesn't really matter if it's going to stick around because you have options for the future.
Of course, the answer depends on your own abilities and risk assessment, but I think it would be safe to say you can arrive at an answer.
Hope this helps.
I am trying to run a LINQ query within a website plugin with Dynamics CRM Hosted. I need to us LINQ to retrieve a list of all the currently registered Members as shown in the MemberWorks tab. But to be host I have no idea where to start.
Ive really jumped in at the deep end with this one to help out a friend, and I find that necessity and crushing time demands are the best way to challenge my brain and learn something new. So please if you van give me relevant pointer Id really appreciate it.
To clarify my LINQ knowledge is at beginner level and my knowledge of the hosted Dynamics CRM datastructure is at a similar level. So Ive not really tried anything as I simply don't know where to start at this stage. But hopefully some kind folk can give me direction and Ill see where that takes me.
Thanks in advance!
If you look at Hosk's blog you will probably find your answer, if not you will have other questions to ask :)
It's quite hard to give an answer to a question this general so excuse me if it's a bit fuzzy and not exactly what you expected
Have spent a week trying to wrap my head around Yii framework, but while I do get a sense of it's elegance, I am finding the learning curve rather steep, compared to the 2 days I spent on Codeigniter. My background is of Unix systems programming (communication stacks), with no MVC exposure, and know only basic PHP (find it fairly simple & straight-forward).
I've considered the no-framework approach, but find it even more daunting given that, I've almost no web-development experience. A framework, at minimum would give guidance in terms of architecture & design.
I might be shooting myself in the foot, but with a tight deadline on ramp-up, and delivering a somewhat complex web-application, I need to get productive real fast.
So wondering if community can guide me, if Codeigniter 2.x, would be good choice for me, given the following requirements --
Easy to learn and able to deliver quickly, something that is functional. Thus needs to have extensive, easy-to-use documents, tutorials (beyond simple-blogs) and a very active community.
Framework needs to make it easy to integrate features like -
User registration with captcha
User verification using random verification key sent via mobile phone
Send Email, short-message to mobile phone
Integrate with Payment Gateway
Have significant no. (close to a hundred) possible CRUD operations
Doesn't get in the way (if not making it easy) to work with AJAX, for things like timeline presentation - including audio-snippets, photographs, video-snippets
Doesn't get in the way (if not making it easy) for the web application to be made accessible on mobile devices s.a. smartphones
Has reasonable performance. Need not be the fastest, but performance is a concern, although secondary.
Of course, I do not need all the features on day-1, and willing to invest some time in reading/learning about the framework, but wouldn't want to read an entire manual first.
Note that I've already searched the Codeigniter forums and found discussion on some of the required functionalities, however most of the interesting libraries seem to be available only on Codeigniter 1.7 and found little confirmation of those being available also for Codeigniter 2.1 ! Also, all Codeigniter books are for 1.7, and none for 2.1. Does that mean that 2.x doesn't have enough adoption and community support ?
Yes. CodeIgniter 2 is a good choice.
It is pretty easy to use and learn. I'd suggest understanding the MVC architecture in general though. They're official documentation is awesome, although sometimes I yearn for the straight-forward API format. You'll notice that they don't show all the available parameters a function will accept up-front; sometimes you have to read the entire page to figure it out al your available options. Note: You'll find that there is no one way or standard in using models in CI. They're as helpful as you manually code them to be.
There are tons of libraries and helpers to do pretty much anything you need, as well as tutorials on how to do them. Not sure what you meant by verification key sent via mobile phone. AJAX is not a problem. CI has this pretty handy is_ajax_request() function that's really useful. Note: there used to be a problem with AJAX request expiring sessions. Not sure if that's still an issue. As far as making it accessible for mobile-devices, you'll find more issues on the front-end than the back.
Baseline (virgin CI) performance is pretty good. It's up to you (your code and queries) to keep it lean.
Many of the libraries you find may say that they were made for 1.7, but may work with 2.x You can try updating them yourself if necessary. We'd be glad to help. Note that "plugins" have been deprecated in CI 2, you'll have to convert plugins to helpers or libraries (depending on your needs). CI 1.7 has a 3-year lead on CI 2. It'll take some time for "the community" to catch up.
Hope this helps.
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I have been interested in learning Rails for some time now and feel now is as good as time as ever to dip in and actually get my hands dirty. I've spent the past week reading every free ebook on Ruby and Ruby on Rails I can find. I just finished reading Ruby Essentials. I have also been playing with http://tryruby.hobix.com/
I have installed Ruby, Rails, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin on a Windows XP machine, I also have access to a Ubuntu machine.
I come from several years of PHP experience and around a year using CodeIgniter.
What I would really like now is a fairly basic Rails app that is a little more in depth than Hello World but not quite up to par with say a forum or blog.
I find its much easier to learn how something works when I can play with already made code and do some trial and error changes.
What I am really looking for is that 'Ohhh, I totally understand now!' moment I had when I first started learning PHP.
Does anyone have an app or know of one that could possibly provide that moment?
Check out the screen casts on Rails at BuildingWebApps . I've watched several and they have been exactly what I was looking for when learning rails. They start simple and keep adding more and more functionality. The commentators move at a good pace and subscribing to the lessons is free.
If you want something that is built already build the sample application that comes with Agile Web Development on Rails, buy the pdf from pragprog.com, the latest version is set to work with Rails 2.2, so will work with 2.3 as all the basic features of the framework will be the same.
When you are ready to move on from that, the Rails Guides website is all new and is a great resource for all developers new and old.
dwc is right though, a blog is a good thing to start on your own, so when you are confident give it a go, even if you don't put it in production it will help you along.
I would recommend railsforphp.com. They have a PHP to Ruby reference which could be quite helpful.
You can also buy the 'Rails for PHP Developers' book as either a paper or digital copy (or both if you really want to). The book is full of examples that show the PHP way and how it compares to the Ruby/Rails way.
As for ready made code, I suggest having a play with Enki. It is a somewhat bare-bones blogging system that should give you a good testing ground.
You should rethink your idea that a blog is too complex. At it's simplest a blog is a textarea and a submit button, and then storing and regurgitating the results. Start with that to get your hands dirty, then add features as you go. In fact, why not practice some Agile and do your own iterations?
The Rails Guides are nice http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
If you don't like the blog idea, you could make a wiki, this isn't very complex either. you simply need a edit button on every page with the text from the linked to it. This will teach you how to handle rails and play with ruby for things like regular expressions and such.
Take your time, break down these problems and and they should be easy for you to solve with rails.
And go on IRC (server freenode channel #rubyonrails) you can use MIRC for that. Ask questions there, I usually am there, (look for nims).
My suggestion would be to start with a simple CMS. This is something you can continue to use and expand as your skills progress and you start other more complicated projects. In the most basic form, this consists of a Page model, and a Topic model. You could then add a User model, some login capabilities and a simple admin interface. After all, Rails was originally envisioned to make it easy to CMS type sites.
As you get this up and running, you can add some plugins to extend the functionality to include tagging, comments, and more. Or you can roll these capabilities yourself.
Set up an account on Github and learn how to use Git. Its great, and better than what you used before (if anything.) You should also learn rake, and capistrano, as these are huge timesavers and work hand in hand with Rails and Github.
http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2007/4/11/sample-rails-application
http://www.railsinside.com/elsewhere/100-7-barebones-rails-apps-to-kick-start-your-development-process.html