I am a .net desktop app developer. I use c# and WPF. I used SQL Server as my database.
Now I want to learn electron, node.js and would like to code in HTML, CSS and Javascript. Also, as everything mentioned above is open-source/free I would change my database as well. Now I will be using MySQL.
In .net we were using n-tier application development. I know that n-tier application development is not specific to .net, so I think it's possible with electron, node.js, HTML, CSS, Javascript using Atom as development tool.
In .net my projects were structured as:
MySolution
|--Entities
| |--Student.cs
| |--Teacher.cs
|--Repositories
| |--RepositoryBase.cs
| |--StudentRepository.cs
| |--TeacherRepository.cs
|--WPFApp
| |--Window.xaml
| |--App.xaml
| |--App.config
The above mentioned structure is just a small demo. In reality we used WCF services and much more. We always have had near about 20 projects for a single Desktop application.
I would like to do same in electron, node.js, HTML, CSS, Javascript and if possible jQuery. Can anyone please guide me about how do they use n-tier applicaiton development in above mentioned app?? If possible can anybody please post a small working demo??
I've known about it for 10 years, I'd imagine, but had never heard of it as being referred to as "n-tier" and had to look it up. The most common multi-tiered pattern in the Node.js world, is "MVC". I am guessing you're used to that pattern, yourself, or the MVVM pattern that I've seen mentioned in .NET circles.
Anyway, I only wanted to make that distinction in hopes of improving your search results; you will probably find better hits with searches for "MVC" than for "n-tier" in places like npmjs.org.
There are several MVC frameworks available and they should be drop-in ready for Electron development. Backbone is rather popular, and the first that comes to mind, but there are also many, many, others.
Analogous to the multi-project structures you're probably used to in .NET, you will find that Node.js development is, also, typically subdivided into multiple "modules". Assuming you want to offer your project as open-source, you will build it as multiple NPM modules and push each to NPM.. then you will use npm install xxxxx in your main project to bring them all in.
If you are not planning to publish your modules as open source, you can also look into npmjs.org's private module service or, like us, host your own using a solution such as "Sinopia".
Migrating to Node.js can be a bit overwhelming and there will be a lot of information to swallow. If I could offer two tips that have been invaluable in my own journey, I would say:
Conform to Node.js and its community, do not try to coerce it to conform to you.
Always try to avoid writing code. Just about anything, generic, that you can think to write has already been written and is available on NPMjs.org. Utility libs, frameworks, etc. It sucks having to learn someone else's code, but it pays dividends, especially in cases where the open-source editions are well support and/or have a large-ish community.
Also, to go one step further on #1 .. you will probably find that NoSQL (especially MongoDB) is often preferred over MySQL in the Node.js circles. Its another mind bender for those of us who grew up on SQL, but you should, at least, carefully consider it.
Best of luck,
Related
I consider myself a well trained WordPress template developer, and i recently started to read books and documents about web app frameworks, particularly Django and Ruby on Rails. I didn't know any of the two languages, but i have no problems to learn another one or two. I really don't get the real benefits of using a framework, because i feel very confident about the power of WordPress. So, can anyone tell me the real benefits of using a framework? For example, Pinterest is made using Django, but i think that i can achieve the same results with a WordPress template using Javascript and CSS3. Can anyone tell me the differences/benefits of using a framework in that particular case?
You can achieve the same frontend with Wordpress, but what you will not be able to achieve is the speed and scale - and most importantly, maintainability - of an application based on a more application-oriented architecture.
Wordpress is highly flexible, but it's also slow, and needs an awful lot of TLC to be able to operate at any kind of significant scale. Its design allows for very flexible runtime modification of behavior, but this is also a bit of a Pandora's Box, since it means that code can end up running all over the place for any given page, which makes maintenance a nightmare.
Wordpress is extremely good at being a CMS, but once you start to push it outside of those bounds, you get into trouble, and find yourself having to write your own more abstract framework that runs inside of the context of Wordpress to be able to fulfill your application's needs.
That said, if you have an application that you can build in the context of Wordpress, I'd say go for it! Wordpress can be a wonderful tool for building a proof-of-concept or MVP. If it gets you up and running, then it may be the right choice over writing a full application. However, just be aware that you're going to hit some brick walls as your product design matures and your audience grows, unless your application fits within a rather narrow set of design requirements, so long-term, you may find yourself having to move to a custom application.
Credentials: I've spent the last couple of years maintaining a Wordpress install that served over 25 million monthly uniques, and we had to get very clever to keep it running. We've since replaced it with a Rails application that serves pages somewhere on the order of 10x-30x faster, and is significantly more extensible as an application, allowing us to start exploring application potential that we really couldn't get with Wordpress.
I once made the decision while working in some start-up to choose WordPress for an advanced e-commerce, community-driven marketplace.
It was an awful decision
This is how I was feeling:
At the beginning, it was looking good - you have an amazing community, plugins for everything etc. But sooner than later I hit the wall - at it's root - WordPress is a blogging platform!
Every piece of content technically is a post.
It's really hard to create advanced item relationships
Functionalities are not consistent. Some functions work one way, while others that seems to be very similar work in a different way. Sometimes you need some weird hacks to achieve task that seem to be simple. It makes you read the docs very often to see how a function that you're using for the 1000th time is working. (However, to be honest, I need to say that the WordPress documentation is great!)
The WordPress community is doing a great job, but compared to any regular Framework there is one main difference - Frameworks are just frameworks - they're a set of tools and those tools are there to help you do your project. WordPress already is trying to be something that you might then change.
I'll never again use WordPress for anything that needs some organised, custom functionality.
I'm actually quite impressed with what people has created with wordpress - so if you want to, it is possible and good luck!
It however often feels like buying a truck and rebuilding it to be a house. There are better ways to build a house.
I want to offer a dissenting opinion, even though I upvoted the top answer.
Is Rails really special?
Rails was created by David Hansson who extracted it from Basecamp, software that's replicated in a free Wordpress plugin, WP Project Manager. I think that's a pretty good indicator that Rails developers are underestimating PHP and Wordpress.
MVC and WP
True, it doesn't follow an MVC pattern. But if you use hooks, separate logic (in plugins) from views (in templates), then you'll have good code separation. (Also hint: custom post types are like models.)
Framework vs Application
As you can see, Wordpress can be treated like an application or a framework. It is an application, with all the components you'd expect to find in a framework. Right out of the box you have security, authentication, and extendibility. And it's meant to be extended.
Scaling
WP powers 18% of the internet's websites, including TechCrunch, Smashing Magazine, and (parts of) CNN. Seems there are ways to make WP scale. Disclaimer: I have no experience working on megasites like these, so I'm offering mere conjecture.
WP Future
The current abition of the WP community is to shift WP from a CMS to a framework. I think it's a natural progression considering that all the pieces are in place. And the Wordpress community is going strong.
Not really an answer, but a hint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks
As if you can replace it completely... I think it is mostly a matter of logic flow. It depends how much imperative (Ruby on Rails) vs. descriptive (WordPress) programming you intend to do.
I don't think wordpress can replace rails, because wordpress have limited set of API and support as you compare it with RoR. Though wordpress is powerful tool for blogging application, but the same effect can be achieved with rails using gems like,
Radiant CMS,
Refinery CMS,
Locomotive.
Adding the power like ttd that can be done vary easily with rails is very difficult with wordpress.
Same with authentication and authorization mechanism like devise and cancan. There is no easy option to do the same with wordpress.
Rails make the programmer's life easier. For whole web app I will always prefer to go with the rails.
Wordpress cannot replace X framework, but the two can certainly complement each other.
For example a WP front end serving up CMS content with an attractive theme is pretty hard to beat; proxy to a back end server for custom content and voila, best of both worlds. Otherwise, WP will inevitably fall short of meeting every requirement and you'll find yourself going down the square-peg-round-hole rabbit hole, a painful place indeed; that's where X framework comes in, filling in the WP gaps.
The notion that WP does not scale may have some truth to it, but for the general case, the 95%, it will handle whatever you throw at it, particularly with WP Cache or other caching plugin thrown into the mix.
Some may say, well, you can build WP with Django or RoR! Heh, heh, you first ;-)
FWIW, I avoid dynamic language frameworks in favor of their statically/strongly typed counterparts. Use WP for the bling, and static X framework for the speed/scalability/safety. Of course, that's a matter of preference, clearly some prefer runtime flexibility over compile time safety. I'm fully in the latter camp these days...
In the simplest term,, I always want to put it like this...
You can use a framework to make WordPress it self and better
But you can't use WordPress to make a framework
Wordpress is a great CMS any way
Pros
1. We can easily set up a website using free themes and plugins
2. There are numerous number of plugins to extend our website functionality
3. Excellent Community support
4. The CMS uses PHP and MySQL, somewhat easy to lean
Cons
1. Updating plugins and themes regularly.
2. Slow
3. Malicious files can be easily injected.
I have to build an Automated Chat Application which will have it's front end as a widget on the website and back-end logic at server. It's main purpose will be to provide an interface to the customers to solve their queries with a chat personnel sitting at a location with the server as the communication point. If there is no person available then the application will parse the string and try to give a few answers by checking among a database.
I have a very good experience in C++ and a little experience in Java. The main concerns of the application are source code security and highest efficiency.
The restrictions which i am facing from the server side is that i have to run it on IIS and the only scripting languages supported are PHPv5, ASP, ASP.NET and FastCGI.
I am not going for PHP since i have found from googling that it's possible to reverse engineer it and it will take me a lot of time to learn a new language, so a strict no.
I prefer going for FastCGI cause it will serve exactly what my requirements are, but i am unable to find a way to compile on windows with C++ or any good tutorial. Most of the results i found on google related to FastCGI development were about Linux or in Perl for windows. I am also unable to find a way as to how to compile it on windows platform.
I am now being forced to go for ASP.NET, which will be my last option since it's an Interpreted Language and Interpreted languages have a tendency to be weak against reverse engineering.
So can anyone suggest me how to go about with it. If there is no way out for FastCGI then suggest me which will be good amongst MVC and WebForms for the given situations. I am new to both of them and i need to complete the application within two weeks.
First things first.
EVERYTHING can be reverse-engineered. It just depends on how smart the guy trying to reverse engineer your code is. Obfuscating is not a replacement for securing your code. If your server side PHP is safely stowed away on your server with all the proper security parameters configured, then you have nothing to worry about. But if you don't know PHP already then fair enough.
ASP.NET is only partly interpreted. The C# or visual basic that you use for the server side code is compiled. What IS interpreted is the code directly on the page. Remember though that most of your logic does not take place there... it takes place in the code pages which are compiled and the page code is mainly for displaying what you have already calculated. But don't forget that any server side tags that you put into your HTML on your pages get parsed and stripped out when the page is served to the user. If you have a tag <%: ViewData["value"] %>, the user will only see the value for "value" when they look at your source, and not the actual server side tag.
You are going to have a tough time learning ASP.NET AND completing your app in two weeks. I personally love ASP.NET MVC, but if you don't have much of a web programming background then it probably isn't the easiest thing to learn in comparison to Web Forms. That said however...
I'm not a fan of PHP, but it is widely used and a great language for setting up simple projects quickly. There are also tons of examples out there and it is of the first web languages that people learn (in part for those reasons). If you have two weeks to learn a language and set up a project, go with PHP. Even with a C background, there is a lot more to web programming than just knowing a server side language, so you'd be best off a quick and dirty language that gets what you want to get done, done, with minimal effort. That is to say, PHP.
FastCGI / C++ has a better performance. If you need a link on how-to: http://cgi.sourceforge.net/ and much more with google search.
I'm quite new to the field of computer science but I think I've got a pretty decent idea for a website to aid classroom CS learning and collaboration. I'd really like to develop the website from the ground up and make it a sort of pet project in hopes of eventually getting it out on the web for free. Hopefully I can get some teachers to adopt it for use with their classes.
The problem is that I honestly don't know where to start. I've got the idea but I don't have enough formal education to guide the implementation of my idea. The site should have quite a bit of functionality in the long run. I'll need to be able to store user and class data/files as well as offer discussion boards and other things.
Without getting into too many details, what is the best way for me to get started? What languages and databases should I be most interested in as I build the site and ensure scalability and future functionality developments? I would really appreciate any information you could give me on how to structure the project/stack as I don't have much of a clue at this point. I have the idea. Now I just need a little bit of help getting started.
Thanks!
There are definitely already projects out there that will (more than likely) do everything you're currently considering. That said, there's immense benefit in doing a project like this for personal development - you get to learn, and you expand your public portfolio. If you run the project as open source, you can also demonstrate your ability to work with others. All very good (hireable) attributes.
Are there any programming languages you already know? Are there any that your course is going to be teaching that you know ahead of time?
There are so many different languages and frameworks available to choose from, but I'll only mention a few.
Language: Framework
.NET: ASP.NET MVC
python: django
ruby: ruby-on-rails
I'm a huge fan of django. Python is quite a nice language to learn. I'd recommend django purely from a biased point of view. Python runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, though you probably don't want to host python on windows (culture more than ability).
Conversely, if you really like Windows, ASP.NET MVC makes building out websites very very easy. Mono does allow you to run .NET on linux and mac, but you might find support lacking, and I wouldn't suggest using Mono for your first project.
PHP is (was?) another popular language for building websites in. There are tonnes of web frameworks available for PHP. Popular opinion seems to be that PHP makes it easier for developers to write bad code, though it is possible to write good code with PHP.
Unfortunately, without knowing a rough direction in which you're headed, it's nearly impossible to offer some concrete advice. Database choice will generally come down to what language and platform (linux/.net) you're targeting. Web server also fits this profile. Once you decide on a language, narrowing down the other choices become a lot easier.
Learn HTML to start with and keep improving as per needed with css , javascript. You won't need more then this.
I have some community running Drupal 6. Drupal 6 have great numbers of modules for what I need, plus word "Community plumbing".
I've tried PHP frameworks like Yii, but I dont like PHP-CLI, because I feel that not well integrated with the PHP itself. So, I stay with Drupal 6 with lots of hacks.
But Drupal now become more "CMS", more "Enterprise" (just like lots of Java CMS).
With Drupal 7, out of the box, it easier to make a newspaper site, but to me, it more difficult to tailored to my needs, it more magic, and also slower.
The word "Community plumbing" has been replaced with "Open Source CMS", with statement "Use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications". This is scares me as community-based application developer.
Django looks promising, but Rails have much more open source kick-ass app avaiable.
I dont know anything about Drupal 8. I dont know what to do for my next development.
It sounds like you are looking to move from a CMS to a framework. I am not going to give advise on frameworks here, since there are numerous topics on SO that cover this already.
A few things you should realize, coming from Drupal, moving to a (RAD)framework are the following:
Drupal is not OO, has its own ways of using PHP (hooks, template overrides) and such. Expect the experience to be very different. Your Drupal-gained-knowledge may come in handy, but is often of little use in framework-land where OO is the alpha and omega. :)
Drupal takes a lot from your hands. By installing some module, you have a new feature. With frameworks you are all on your own in this. You should select a framework that works with gems, packages or modules itself if you want to stand on shoulders of others peoples work. The main difference between these libraries and Drupal modules, is that you will have to implement and integrate the libs yourself. I consider that a very good thing, since it makes no assumptions up front and allows you to build exactly what you had in mind, yet having the same experience as Drupal-modules: many things are already done for you.
You know PHP. You probably don't know Python or Ruby as well. That means PHP-based frameworks have an advantage for you. But read various posts on SO about the downsides of PHP used in Frameworks to see some reasons why learning a new language and environemnt is not all that bad.
All in all, I think you will be surprised byt the increase in development-efficiency when coming from Drupal into a framework.
Make your own CMS in 'just PHP' and go back to being happy and having fun coding all day long :)
More people than you have noticed this behavior of leaving developers that have supported a system for years and years with a take it or leave it option.
It seems all the big companies can do with a product is make it 'bigger'. More convoluted, automated, with more layers of code and less modularity - all in the aim to make 'the ultimate megaglobular ultrauniversecorporate site'. Almost as if small clients with 'just a website' don't exist. Enterprise products belong in the enterprise domain. When you upgrade a non-'do the mightiest world-spanning web site/application' system, you shouldn't get a 'do the mightiest world-spanning web site/application'system.
The bigger system may be able to do more things and be more scalable to large systems, but they leave behind no small, accurate tool to do small and medium jobs quickly and with ease. Also: "Documentation is not scalable" (c) H. Erlandsson. To even find the doItAll() function or even know it exists, you have to wade through increasingly huge documentation. To then learn how to use it correctly, if you don't know all the component the function builds on, you have learn the behavior of many subsystems to understand how to apply some terse declaration to your problem.
The ultimate something can be several refined gems, and not an asteroid-size cluster of crystals.
Was a bit tricky to read out exactly what you're asking, hope I read you right. I can recommend some programming system gems, but they are not in the web dev domain, maybe others will know a few :)
I have little experience with ruby itself. I am going to hire somebody to write a web based application and I wanted it to be written in RoR but I was recommend mono. I guess because they like mono and because they think the RoR is slow.
The whole application would be some kind of social media meta management tool. There will be front end web based part and then back end doing the 'real stuff'.
I have no experience with mono at all and I am not experienced enough to comfortably say that RoR is the best choice.
I understood that if RoR is configured properly it could be pretty fast. I read that RoR has some troubles with scalability. I will start the application small and if it's successful I need to scale it up.
What would you recommend?
in the light of
performance
scalability
easiness to test
easiness to maintain, develop code/project
( I like ruby but I am not going to be the developer myself. I prefer to choose the 'better' option if there is such answer to that question)
please feel free to suggest anything else ...
If you are not going to write it yourself, you may want to go with what the person who will write it is most comfortable with.
Full disclosure: I have developed several sites now using Mono and I love it. I have used Ruby-on-Rails but not for anything nearly as big as what I have done in Mono. Keep that in mind.
Quick answer: In the greater scheme of things, Ruby-on-Rails and ASP.NET MVC have more in common than not. My choice would be ASP.NET MVC on Mono but I doubt you would regret choosing either.
Architecture: If you want one way of doing it out of the box, choose Ruby-on-Rails. If you want to be able to choose what you feel are the best-of-the-best technologies from a range of choices, choose .NET (Mono).
Ruby-on-Rails is more of a turn-key solution in that it provides a standard way of doing pretty much everything you need out of the box. .NET (Mono) offers a lot more power (my opinion let's say) but there are a lot of different pieces to choose from and you have to choose a technology stack yourself. As an example, RoR has a standard way of accessing databases while .NET Mono let/force you to choose from a dozen different ways to do that.
Mono and .NET generally have a little better separation of concerns so the purist in you might like that. If not, you actually find the roll-up-your sleeves and get it done attitude of Ruby more to your liking.
Performance and Scalability: This should clearly go to .NET and Mono. In fact, I believe the fastest way to run Ruby-on-Rails is to use IronRuby to run it on .NET. StackOverflow is written in ASP.NET MVC and, given the amount of traffic, it obviously performs great. Proof is in the pudding. That said, the performance bottleneck will probably not be your choice of framework.
Testing: Old style ASP.NET (now called WebForms) is considered pretty hard to test. The newer ASP.NET MVC was designed to be easy to test and is similar to RoR. One major factor is that in Mono you will probably be using a statically typed language (like C#) while Ruby is of course a dynamically typed language. You have to write more tests in a dynamic language (because the compiler/interpreter will not catch type problems) but it can also be easier to write tests if you are not fighting the compiler. I think it is a matter of taste and style (I like static) but this is a major factor in answering this question.
Of course, since .NET/Mono is a multi-language platform, you could always write your ASP.NET MVC tests in a dynamic language. You could even do it in Ruby (IronRuby). Perhaps that would be the best of both worlds (static checking on your real code and flexible dynamism in your tests). I have considered doing this myself using IronPython for tests.
Maintenance and development: This is a tough one. It depends what you are writing, what third-party libraries you might need, and what tools you are going to use. I would say that RoR is probably the more advanced MVC framework. My own thoughts are that Ruby-on-Rails is probably a shade easier to write but a little bit harder to maintain.
Community: I like the Ruby community more than the .NET one but I think I like the Mono one the best. That makes it a little confusing. The core Mono guys (like Michael Hutchinson that answered here) are simply awesome. I really like MonoDevelop as a tool (IDE) as well. It just keeps getting better and better. Michael, thank you for Git support if you had anything to do with that. :-)
Tools: If you are writing for Mono you can use the whole universe of .NET tools (VisualStudio, ReSharper, Reflector, etc) so that is pretty hard to beat. That is assuming you develop on Windows of course. On Linux or Mac the tool of choice for Mono would be MonoDevelop. It supports version control, a software debugger, and NUnit tests right in the IDE and is completely cross-platform.
It seems like a lot of Ruby folks just use a simple text editor. This may just be because an IDE just does not have as much to offer a dynamic language as it does a static one. Here is a SO question on what people like for Ruby:
What Ruby IDE do you prefer?
EDIT: Just to make things confusing...there is another MVC framework for .NET/Mono that is even more like Ruby-on-Rails; MonoRail even has an implementation of ActiveRecord. MonoRail has actually been around longer than ASP.NET MVC but I would stick with ASP.NET MVC these days as that is where the future lies. ASP.NET MVC is open source by the way and ships with Mono out of the box (the actual Microsoft code).
I can speak more to Rails than Mono. RoR is pretty scalable these days with all of the cloud hosting services available. Web applications query data and render web pages using that data, which really isn't that big of a deal. Most performance issues are caused by database and schema design issues, not the web framework. Typically, database response times dwarf other portions of server processing. RoR is also very easy to test. Testing is a more natural part of development than in other languages that I use. When I started RoR programming I was used to the much more structured world of Java, and the more dynamic Rails won me over for web development.
Firstly, I work on MonoDevelop, a crossplatform IDE for Mono (including ASP.NET & ASP.NET MVC), so feel free to consider my answer biased, but hopefully it will be helpful anyway.
Performance: a decent JIT compiler (Mono) should be much faster than an interpreter (Ruby). But it depends on the programmer's skill too - well-written Ruby could be faster than really badly written C#. The libraries and database and caching mechanisms you use will be a big factor too, but these aren't fundamental to the languages/frameworks.
Scalability: AFAIK there is no magic bullet for web app scalability, and although I don't have practical experience in this field, here's some info I've picked up. It really depends on your database usage, how your session state is stored, and how caching is implemented. This isn't really fundamental to either framework - once you start scaling to multiple machines, you'll probably have many machines/processes for database servers, cache servers, message queues, frontends, servers for static content, etc. Likely only the frontends will be ASP.NET or ROR, and if they're stateless, you can simply clone them and handle the scalability problems on the backend.
Testing: I can't speak for Ruby, but ASP.NET MVC (but not vanilla ASP.NET) was designed to be easily testable using .NET testing tools such as NUnit (Mono's own unit tests use NUnit).
Maintenance and development: Again, I can't really speak for Ruby, but it's pretty much a given that it will be easiest to develop (at least initially) in the language & framework that the developer already has experience with. Also, .NET has some amazing development tools on Windows - Visual Studio, ReSharper, etc. - and there's a huge pool of experienced C# and ASP.NET developers you can hire, though few of them will know Linux/Mono.
Also, StackOverflow uses ASP.NET MVC :)
To introduce a little levity...
How about DOS on Dope: the last MVC web framework you will ever need?
There are of course a dizzying array of choices but another nice alternative is Django.
It is basically Ruby-on-Rails for Python so most of the comparisons of RoR vs. ASP.NET MVC would apply. Depending on what kind of site you are building, the really interesting feature of Django is the automatic admin interface.
If you need to be up and running quickly, I would go for RoR. Scaling rails is becoming easier with time and you have a big range of ruby runtime environments to choose from MRI 1.8, 1.9, REE 1.8, JRuby (run on java VM), Rubinius.
ASP.NET MVC is nice, but I still think it has some way to go before it offers the same speed of development as RoR.