A mobile app is being built to replicate the functionality of my Wordpress site with almost 5,000 registered users. The dev team is going to be using Parse for a lot of the back-end stuff like user management and online/offline content sync.
I've done quite a bit of searching but have found little on the topic of migrating your users from the Wordpress database to Parse's. In addition, almost half of the user base registered through Wordpress Social Login. I was curious if anyone else had undertaken such a migration or might have any ideas where might be best to start. I feel like there must be some faster way of doing this than hand-coding a script that somehow scrapes the Wordpress and social-plugin database for user accounts and then gracefully recreates them with the Parse framework.
Thanks in advance!
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I feel like my question is partially answered through a number of other questions, but I just can't piece everything together for my case.
Basically, I'd like to build a fairly simple web app, but also be able to fairly easily build a mobile app for it down the line. From my research, the best practice would be to build a RESTful JSON API, and then use that API both for my web app and for my mobile app.
I've already gone ahead and developed authentication for my JSON API (using : http://lucatironi.net/tutorial/2015/08/23/rails_api_authentication_warden/) and I've got it up on Heroku. Now for my web app, I'm using HTTParty to consume that API, and I'm getting the JSON back all fine and dandy. However, I'm not quite so sure what to do with the database. My first thought was that maybe I need to access the API's database via it's own API calls, but that seems incredibly complex (just the thought of having to make functions for User.find_by_<every attribute> makes me scared). The other thought would be to have my web app use the API app's database. However, I can't find any info on how to do that if the app is on Heroku.
So basically, I'm wondering what the best way to go about this would be. Surely there is a standard out there that every big or small web app with an API uses. I'm really surprised that something so prevalent these days is hard to find good answers for. Or am I going about this all wrong? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Databases are add-ons in Heroku parlance.
Use heroku addons to get a list of the add-ons for your apps.
$ heroku addons -a appname
Add-on Plan Price
──────────────────────────────────────── ───────── ─────
heroku-postgresql (relaxing-purely-8366) hobby-dev free
└─ as DATABASE
First you may want to remove the database attached to your front-end app:
heroku addons:destroy fat-samurai-1234
Then find the name of the database add-on attached to your API app and attach the add-on to your frontend app.
heroku addons:attach shining-sushi-1234 -a sushi.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/managing-add-ons#creating-an-add-on
As to which approach is legitimate that's a matter of discussion. Many apps today use a single page architecture where the entire app is created on the front end - in javascript. So your app just consumes your REST api. Popular frameworks for this are Ember.js, Bootstrap and Angular.
The other approach would be to to create a classic server side app - while it's possible to create an app that would consume the REST api there is a significant overhead involved so it will be more performant to connect directly to the database.
I am working on an app that will require the user to authenticate against yelp and foursquare, and potentially facebook and pinterest( a lot of things ).
I started by persisting all this info locally on disk, but then thought this might be insecure, then I went to the next scenario which is to have a collection on the backend that has all configs needed that every time on load I go and get it.
Anyhow, I was wondering whether people have a way to gut out all the configs related to this kind of info from the app, and maybe put it somewhere or whats considered best practices for this scenario?
An example of these configs would be Oauth Token from Foursqaure, yelp, facebook, and whatever other api I need to connect to.
I a thinking of creating an iPhone/iOS app that would include a feature where one user could create a list of words and then save them to their account on a server. Also (and this is very important), the user could share their list with other users by giving them permission.
So my question is, how can I go about creating such a server? For right now, I have a home computer (running Windows XP that just stores data for my music system) which I can use to host the server. I am also open to the use of other online storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox (I can't remember if Amazon does anything like that). However (and I know this may complicate things a bit), but at least for now, I want/need to stick with free services/options.
Just to recap, the key features that I am looking for are:
create users/accounts (on the server)
eventually I may [try] to incorporate the use of other services to log users in like with their email account, OpenId, etc.
the ability to access (log in to) the server (with credentials) from my app
the ability to send/receive data between the server and my app
the ability to share data between users
I know this is a lot to ask for, but if anyone has any suggestions or can get me going in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.
The basic setup would be as follows:
Backend: Database (MySQL), Web server (Apache), with server side scripting (PHP).
Client: iOS device with developed app.
Communication: use HTTP client/server model, communicating with something like JSON.
This is much the same setup as a web server, but instead of serving html/css/javascript etc the results will be JSON.
As far as implementing specifics such as login in, and sharing data between users, this is purely dependent on your implementation. This is not trivial, and not something that can be easily stated in a single post.
Hope this helps.
You could build your own webservice in PHP, Ruby or Python. If you do so I would recommend building a RESTful webservice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) and then use RestKit (http://restkit.org/) to handle the data in the iOS app. Especially RestKit's CoreData integration is nice in my opinion.
Another solution would be using a service like Parse (https://parse.com/products/data). The first million or so requests per month are free but after that it could get pricy. I personally have not tried it so I couldn't tell you if it is any good.
I'm building a standalone couchdb application. These are called couchapps. The idea is that the database itself is served on port 80 and returns HTML and works as the actual website. This is a very powerful idea and I'm entirely amazed by this new concept of having your code live inside your database.
But I'm having some issues with user registration. The one built into couchdb allows for cookies to be set and makes it really easy to plug it into your website. But there's several quite important things missing that my app requires in order to say that it has a "proper" user registration system.
There's no signup verification. No email is sent, no captcha is displayed. This means that anyone could spam your _users database and create as many new users as they please.
If a user forgets their password there's no facility to help them recover it.
Any idea how I could overcome these issues without doing any hardcore Erlang development at a lower level (not an Erlang guy)? It would also be great if anybody knew if I could be using OAuth to authenticate against Twitter or GitHub accounts and have that integrate seemlessly with how couchdb data is handled (inside validate_doc_update functions).
Thank you
While the built in user database can work, I would not recommend it for the workflow you describe. Here are some other options:
Browser ID
I would really recommend using BrowserID. IrisCouch has provided a plugin to couchdb here:
https://github.com/iriscouch/browserid_couchdb
This will take care of the normal registration workflow.
If you want to take it a step further and have your users "Fairly Anonymous", you can follow the example of this couchapp called "Mingle"
https://github.com/thedod/Mingle
Twitter Integration
Max Ogden's "DataCouch" project has a log in via twitter, although it is using some Node external processors to make it work. See here:
https://github.com/maxogden/datacouch/blob/master/processors/auth/twitterauth.js
Facebook integration
https://github.com/ocastalabs/CouchDB-Facebook-Authentication
OpenID
https://github.com/mcaprari/couchdb-openid
I dont think you can use the oauth purely with Couch, as this post suggests:
http://bennolan.com/2011/01/11/couchdb-oath.html
so the closest you will get there is following what Datacouch has done.
Hope these suggestions help.
I have recently started playing around with iOS development and have got most of the basics down. I would however like to know about some best practices and what you guys think is the best in coding practice and application architecture.
What I have in mind is a simple application that gets information from a web server, displays the data to the user, and allows the user to edit the data which must then be updated on the web server.
What I would like to know is:
1) What type of web server / architecture is best suited for something like this? For example, data passing / updating similar to something like the facebook or twitter etc. applications where data is retrieved, potentially updated, and sent back for updating.
2) What type of authentication / security can be built into an application like this? I was thinking something in the line of username / password being stored on the server. Obviously the data should be secure when being transfered.
3) Are there any "free" web servers out there to play around with. I'm not building anything enterprise size, just need somewhere to play. Would the Google App Engine be suitable for something like this? What I have thought up to now is that you would probably need to implement a web service or something. Is this correct? Or are there better ways?
4) Are there any good tutorials around? I have started looking at the ones in the apple.com developer center, but I would like to get other people's point of views too.
I realise these are not really programming questions, but I would appreciate any insight that some more experienced iOS developers have. I would like to get the best practices down by incorporating the above into an app.
Thanks!
This doesn't sound like you need an iOS app, more like just a browser based app that works on the iPhone. If you need features like the GPS, Camera, Gyroscope, taking offline things that are native to the phone, then yes build it on iOS.
But if it's a simple web application that performs the operations you mentioned, then you can look at building a mobile web application. The nice thing is that it will work across iPhone, Droid, WiMo 7, really anything that can host a browser.
1) You can pick almost anything you're comfortable with. I program in both ASP.NET and Python for web apps. Personally, I'm building a web app on Django with Python. It's cheap (free) and there are lots of resources for learning as well as an active community.
2) Security is a rather large topic, there are many things beyond authentication and authorization, like cross-site scripting, sql injection, etc that need to be taken into consideration. Django has some things that help with this. But at the simplest you can secure your site with SSL encryption when performing authentication. You should also consider OpenID as an alternative for authentication, like how StackOverflow gives you the option.
3) I do all my "play" on my macbook pro or pc at home. You can do all of this for free on your own machine, and when you're ready to deploy pick a host, like Amazon or something like Media Temple.