I have built two rails apps that need to communicate and send files between each other. For example one rails app would send a request to view a table in the other apps' database. The other app would then render json of that table and send it back. I would also like one app to send a text file stored in its public directory to the other app's public directory.
I have never done anything like this so I don't even know where to begin. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
You requirement is common for almost all the web apps irrespective of rails, Communicating with each other is required by most modern web apps. But there is a small understanding that you need to get hold on,
Web sites should not directly access each others internal data (such as tables), (even if they are build by the same language (in this case Rails) by the same developer),
That is where the web-services comes in to play, So you should expose your data through web services so that not only rails application can consume that, but also any app that knows how to consume a web service will get benefit.
Coming back to your question with Rails, rails supports REST web services out of the box, So do some googling about web services, REST web services with rails
HTH
As a starting point, look at ActiveResource.
Railscast
docs
Message queuing systems such as RabbitMQ may be used to communicate things internally between different apps such as a "mailer" app and a main "hub" application.
Alternatively, you can use a shared connection to something like redis stick things onto a "queue" in one app and read them for processing from the other.
In recent Rails versions, it is rather easy to develop API only applications. In the Rails core master, there was even a special application type for these apps briefly (until it got yanked again). But it is still available as a plugin and probably one day becomes actually part of Rails core again. See http://blog.wyeworks.com/2012/4/20/rails-for-api-applications-rails-api-released for more information.
To actually develop and maintain the API of the backend service and make sure both backend and frontend have the same understanding of the resources, you can use ROAR which is great way to build great APIs.
Generally, you should fully define your backend application with an API. Trying to be clever and to skip some of the design steps will only bring you headaches in the long run...
Check out Morpheus. It lets you create RESTful services and use familiar ActiveRecord syntax in the client.
Related
I really like Ruby on Rails but I have also developed in node js. Currently I'm making a web app which has chat functionality that could have 30 people in it. For that I want to use node js.
I have never done this, I'm confused on how's traffic divided between app. How is the state shared between apps for example how would I share the user session will I have to hit the database for every request.
My first recommendation is to not split a web app between two separate server platforms. It overly complicates the project and isn't necessary at all.
That being said, if it must be done, you could use one of the platforms as the 'main' one and the other one for API endpoints stationed at localhost:some-port-number. This way, if you were in the main platform (Rails let's say), you could request data via the node.js API by redirecting it to whatever IP address (make it a local IP) that node is running on.
Again, I recommend against this. But that's one solution if it must be done.
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 currently have a running site. However, I need to do some task to sync some data to my friend's site.
So that, I need another app for fetching data from my running app's DB and submit data to another site using a gem call mechanize.
My problem will be:
Do I need a whole Rails app to do the job? If not, what would be the best practice in my case?
Is there any easy way for accessing my running app's DB? For now, the only thing I know is AR.
Thanks
API
What you're looking for is an API -- a way to connect to a source of data & use that data in some other application:
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API)
specifies how some software components should interact with each other
APIs are actually very simple -- you have a series of endpoints which an application can connect to, pulling data, typically as JSON objects. As noted by Rajarshi Das, these endpoints will likely be based on the RESTful resource structure
Rails
Rails, by design, is very good at providing API's:
This Railscast shows how to use the rails-api gem to create a RESTful API that your other app can connect to
I have a Rails application that right now is pretty standard: Heroku/PostgreSQL backend, users go directly to my site to update data, there's no mobile app or anything. We're going to start licensing out the tech to other companies, so that different versions of the interface live on company1.mywebsite.com, company2.mywebsite.com, etc, where all of these interfaces share the same database.
I want some advice on how to go about building this. Do I create a separate Rails app for company1, company2, etc (with a lot of redundant code) and then set up each of them with API keys to query my master app, using its RESTful routes?
Any tutorials to point me to would be great as well.
I recommend you the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails, by Paul Dix. It has a lot of info about the kind of system that you want to build.
To answer your question:
Build an API server. It serves a JSON – for example – RESTful interface.
api.mydomain/client1/users.json
Build a frontend server. It consume the API service – using typhoeus for example – and serves the final pages. It uses a subdomain or domain name for identification of different clients.
client1.mydomain/users
We have a similar "platform".
What we did:
build a master API app (REST + Push)
build a core plugin for rails which has all the shared code
build a separate rails app for each client which has all the client specific code
We are using this setup for 3 years now and I'm pretty happy with it.
I am going to write a Ruby application that implements a video conversion workflow consisting of multiple audio and video encoding/processing steps.
The application interface has two core features:
queueing new videos
monitoring the progress for each video
The user can access these features using a website written in Ruby on Rails.
The challenge is this: I want make the workflow app a self-sufficient application, not dependent on the existence of the web view.
To enable this separation I think that adding a network API to the workflow application is a good solution because this allows the workflow app to reside on a different server than the web server.
My question is: Which solution do you suggest for such a network API?
A few options are:
implement a simple TCP server and invent my own string based API
use some sort of REST api (I don't know if this is appropriate for this situation)
some sort of web-services solution (SOAP, XML-RPC)
another existing framework
Feel free to share your thoughts on this.
I would suggest two things:
First, use REST as your API. This allows you to write one core application with both a user interface and an API for outside applications to use.
Second, take a look at PandaStream. It's a Merb application that encodes videos from multiple formats into flash. It has a REST API, and there's even a Rails plugin so you can integrate it with your application. It might be a good example codebase, or even a replacement for the one you're trying to build.
Hope my answer helped,
Mike