I'm building something like Facebooks Wall inside of Rails. It will look something like this:
Stacey S. Wants to be Friends
You've been invited to the Summer Social
Pat Replied to your Message: Hey!!!
American Pet Society has a new Post: Love Your Cat!
There are two ways to do this. I could have each of these different events write to the events database when they are created or I could pull from the relationships, invitation, inbox and posts tables and create the events on the fly.
I'm leaning towards the events database approach because it seems cleaner to just call that one table than all the other tables and then sort them correctly. Is this how you would do it?
I'm building a system with similar requirements now, and I think you'll find that the performance characteristics of the latter approach make it extremely untenable. depending on how much usage you intend to get out of the system, you may find the event table to be a performance hog during the request as well. What I'm doing is using an architecture that's basically CQS with event sourcing which builds the feeds for a given user in the background and caches them in a thoroughly denormalized fashion to make the request cycle very short.
Another approach you should look at is using Chronologic: https://github.com/gowalla/chronologic. It may save you quite a bit of effort.
By all means, it will save you from a lot of complicated queries and sorting. Go for the event table approach.
Related
I am planning to write a Node.js-powered RESTful web service that I will use for a mobile application which provides some sort of location based features. The most basic use case is going to look something like this:
the user can create a resource by sending a request to the web service containing the resource's name and the user's current location (latitude and longitude)
the web service will store the metadata about this resource internally in some sort of collection
the user can query the web service for a list of resources within 5km of his current location
One of the first problems that came up in my mind was scalability. Let's suppose that at some point in the future the server will hold metadata for 1 million resources. When a user will query for nearby results, looping through 1 million entries to compute the distance will take forever.
There are many services out there that have the same flow, so I thought implementing something like this is not going to take me a lot of time. I might have been wrong.
I am now two days into researching proven methods and algorithms. By now I have read everything I could put my hands on about QuadTrees, Geohases, databases with spatial indexing support, formulas and so on. However, I still can't get the whole picture of how everything is going to work.
I was hoping that maybe someone who has worked on something similar could share his insight on what approach might be the most suitable considering this use case and the technologies that I am planning to use. Also, a short description of how it can be implemented would help me a lot!
For those who are also looking for more information on this topic out of curiosity, my answer might not provide much clearance. However, some answers in here might help you understand how you could achieve proximity searches using Geohashes.
My approach, after doing a little research on Redis, will be not to overcomplicate things and just use the tools that are already out there. It has out of the box support for spatial indexing and will most probably meet all my persistance requirements for this project.
Apparently MongoDB also comes with built-in support for geodata. In fact, even RDBMS like MySQL or SQLite do come with such capabilities.
I am about to embark on the creation of one of my first meaningful rails apps, and am a bit unsure of how to structure things.
Here's my situation. I am using a SAAS inventory software that keeps track of approximately 4000 products. I need an app that can perform routine maintenance functions on the products. For example, to give you an idea:
Every week, calculate and set the "low stock alert quantity" for each product based on historic sales
Assign products to product categories based on rules (i.e. if the word "t-shirt" is in the title, automatically add it to the t-shirts category)
etc etc
My questions are as follows:
I'm not sure exactly how to structure the data in this app. Should I query the API each time I need to retrieve the products? Or should I build a local copy of the inventory in a local database, for faster querying? If I am to build a local copy of the database, what would be an efficient way of keeping an up to date version of each product without consuming too much server resources? Obviously I can't pull 4000 products via the API at once...and I also don't want a cron job to be running every minute of the day.
Where should I place the code for my remote API functions? Do I create a class, module, or something else?
Thanks for any advice.
First of all, do you really need a web interface? I don't see so in your app description. If what you want to build is a maintenance set of tools that would be executed periodically, why would you use Rails?
The way of structuring data depends on your needs and resources. Does your SAAS provide instant notifications on products update, such as webhooks? Does your SAAS API let you fetch only products that were updated after a certain date? What's more important to you, speed or working with up to date data? Answering those questions to yourself should help you to decide what the best approach is.
Regarding the app design, it looks that you could write a gem where you could have different modules to manage data, execute operations with that data and connect to the third party service, and use that gem in scripts that would execute periodically. I would recommend you reading a book on Object Oriented design that I truly believe it'd help you, Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby.
Just one last word, I'm taking too many assumptions here, no one but you know better your requirements, and the design of your software depends on that.
If your API follows REST then it can very easily be integrated into rails using ActiveResource. If the API is more complicated, you could use ActiveModel and roll your own implementation. Just create a base class of your own that handles connection and authentication and extend your models from that. Given the limited description of your problem, there's not much more I can say.
I'm interested in learning how to implement a News Feed / Activity Feed on a web app for multiple models like Books, Authors, Comments, etc...
Any recommendations from the group? Gems/Plugins, or experience personally or from others on the best/smartest way to proceed?
Thanks!
You don't need any Gem.
Create a new model, e.g. Activity, to store activity details. The module should store at least the activity timestamp, the event (e.g. created, destroyed, published, ...) and the id of the related record (you can even use a polymorphic association if you want)
Create a method which gets in input a record with additional metadata and creates a new activity record
In you controllers, call the method each time you want to keep track of an action, passing the modified record as parameter
Then you'll have a list of Activity records you can easily fetch to display the latest events.
First and foremost, I’d like to be open and say that I am an employee of Stream, an API for building scalable news and activity feeds – much like you would see on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media applications.
From my extensive experience as a developer and consultant and continued research and self-education, Stream’s technology stack is extremely effective or competitive. You can get a news or activity feed up and running in a fraction of the time than it would take you to build out your own infrastructure (Cassandra clusters, queuing mechanisms, etc.).
That being said, I highly recommend checking out Stream. What it really comes down to is buy vs build. You can spend months building out a custom solution, or rely on a proven and scalable platform such as Stream that will offer you everything you need to get up and going, in a fraction of the time.
If you're skeptical, check out the 5 minute tutorial at https://getstream.io/get_started/.
Best of luck!
I have a few apps written in ruby on rails and like any good developer I want high quality data about my site, such as measuring the number of new user accounts per day. I'm in the process of writing my own analytics tools, but I feel like i'm re-inventing the wheel. Are there any plugins or gems that could help me pull this data and display it quickly (graphs are a plus)?
If not, what types of features would you want in such a tool (i'll put a plugin on github if my code is good enough)?
Update:
To clarify a bit, i'm looking for business level-analytics. I already use google-analytics for my site traffic, and active-scaffold to get an admin page, right now my application has users which generate tickets and can create surveys, i'm interested in general trends in my application and by graphing new & existing user numbers versus new tickets and new surveys i can get the info that I want. I like to get general numbers, so i'm pulling all the users for the last 30 days, and then iterating over them to count how many i get per day...then i'm saving that to an array and plotting versus tickets, etc. Right i'm doing this using a home brew library which isn't very efficient, and before I put time/energy into making it better I want to make sure i'm not duplicating an existing set of tools. Or writing un-needed code.
If you post how you personally do this, and the answer is at least intelligible i'll be happy to give you a karma bump for your time.
You have three options that are all fairly easy to implement:
Google Analytics
Just include a small javascript snippet in the footer of your page and you get meaningful data about your hits/traffic. This is extremely easy, and will provide traffic information, but nothing about the internal workings about your applications.
New Relic: RPM
New Relic RPM is a service that comes in the form of a plugin. There is a free version, which gives you a (useful) taste of the features it can provide. This plugin will give you hardcore rails analytics. It will tell you what percentage of a request to a controller is spent in the model, in the view, etc. It will tell you how long each SQL call takes. This is great for optimizing your application.
ActiveScaffold
While not in and of itself an administrative tool, ActiveScaffold fits the bill quite nicely. Just create an admin namespace and create ActiveScaffolds for all your models/resources. This lets you see the data in an easy to use way, get simple counts of your rows (to see how many users you have, for example). This is a very easy setup, with little overhead.
Edit to reply to the OP Edit
There are no gems/plugins that I'm aware of that provide business-level analytics that you seem to want, as they are specialized associations between models that can't be predicted. The best bet, in my opinion, would be to roll your own solution that provides the data you want.
Probably the easiest way is to stick with good ol' Google Analytics. I'm pretty sure there are tools for more specific needs, but for general purpose analytics they are probably the best.
I work at an in-house IT department for company running 10 or so only shops of varying complexity. The shops code has been written over the last 8 years, each shop a new branch growing father and father away from the stem (I guess that makes it a bush?)
The need for more and more complex discounts, campaigns and user monitoring are growing rapidly - and changing rapidly as well (you never know what they come up with). So we have decided to write a new system from scratch and bring the different shops back together having them run on the same core code. We have considered .NET, but due to the fact that the design requirements change so fast we have more or less decided to give Rails a try. But we have some uncertainties/questions about rails.
Is Rails (stack) suitable to run to build a shop framework and who should this be organized?
We are running around 10 shops of which some are very much alike only differing in style, where others stands out in functionality, flow and content. But behind the business logic is all the same. The shops functionality is to a great extend the same as well. As an example the checkout page of one shop might display great details about VAT, discounts, P&P, etc. where as another might only show the necessary minimum.
Which approach would you take? Would you build and maintain a runable template shop with a functional superset of the shops. As new functionality is developed then merge the code with the other shops? Sounds a bit cumbersome.
In the example with the checkout page the views would differ from shop to shop, but the controllers and the models would remain the same, as long as you externalize configurations, like payment method types, and so on.
From this perspective it would make more sense just to create a repository of the views and configurations for each shop and then maintain model and controller code in a separate repository.
Would be possible to arrange the views according to shop, keeping all resources in one repositoary /views/shopname/Product. Would this make sense?
What do you think? how would you do this? Will working with rails in this way bring to much trouble?
Our campaign/discount system is growing steadily complex, both GUI and business logic. (in this view Rails seems interesting with its fast turnaround). Our discounts are property based and these properties are stored in a database row.
Making changes in the requirements to the workings of a discount is a real headache. So we are slowly replacing this property based system with a system that for each discount attaches a class (PHP) and a configuration so that each discount type has its own class and each utilization of such discount could specify some values for this class to operate on given current context (basically: what is in the basket)
In rails what approach would you take?
In rails you can easily extend your model (discount) with yet another property, migrate and you are ready (maybe a bit simplified). Could you write a base discount class that relied on a few basic properties and then write modules that hook into (extends) this class in case you need more advanced functionality?
Specifically what would this be in Rails terms a helper?
Some of this post might be a bit unclear. Please do ask questions. Also I'm in the process of learning Rails so please excuse me if don't use the right terms or if I've missed some of the main ideas of Rails.
Thanks
Michael
Is Rails (stack) suitable to run to
build a shop framework and how should
this be organized?
Sure, it can be suitable see:
http://www.shopify.com/
http://www.liquidmarkup.org/
I would not recommend it as a first project though.
Dont forget Spree Commerce as a viable solution that may or not suid your needs. On the other hand, if you want to roll your own solution, also check ActiveMerchant for payment gateway integration.