I need to write web-service that will get files over http and convert them. This service in future might be included in rails application. I wonder what I need to use for that?
Mount as Rack-middleware? Sinatra app? Write Rails-engine? Simple ruby script with networking? Anything else?
Thanks
If you may eventually incorporate it in a rails app, then I would use rails to get the service up and running. The framework provided by rails makes creating web services very easy (sometimes with as little as a line or two of code).
Related
Iam a novice in rails and trying to write my first React frontend. I have read enough to know that there are different methods to use React with rails. I decided to split frontend and backend, and use rails in API mode. I cannot find good sources explaining what I need on my server to get rails and react going, and why. I read so far about npm, node.js, Heroku and so on, but i lack the knowledge to decide what to pick and i dont understand the interactions yet.
Does someone know a good tutorial, some sources or keywords to point me to a direction?
If you want to use Rails just in API mode with React on frontend then you can separate those apps completely.
I.e. use Rails/Puma server for API and have a separate server (Nginx/Apache/Node.js) to serve the frontend React app and other static assets.
For using react as your client-side application and rails for the server-side you need two different applications. As Rails is MVC I suggest you use just ruby and Sinatra server.
In this situation be careful about the cross-origin errors you have to enable it while using two agents.
Take a look at this.
We have a Rails app that acts HTTP API only. On the client side, Ember.js is currently used. We are not overly impressed by Ember and really like the approach Meteor.js takes. So we'd like to exchange the client side with Meteor.js and communicate with the Rails server via websockets that speak the Data Distribution Protocol (DDP), so we can keep using the models, mailers and controllers in Rails. Implementing server side of DDP should be easy.
However, we're unsure how to make Rails talk websockets. We found Reel, which seems to make it easy to accept websocket requests in a standalone environment. Reel seems great as we'd like to implement the DDP on top of the Celluloid stack anyway. But what about running Reel in the Rails environment? Would we need "rails runner" for that? And we'd like to keep using the existing controllers to dispatch incoming requests (like, to add/change/remove resources). Is that even possible without having the request coming through Rack?
Any input is appreciated.
It's a bit late, but I've implemented DDP in Ruby, you can check it out here:
https://github.com/d-snp/ruby-ddp-server
It includes an implementation of EJSON as well. It's built on top of celluloid-websocket, and can be ran simply as a rack app.
I've made an integration with RethinkDB that can be used as a reference to build your own collections implementation.
https://github.com/d-snp/ruby-ddp-server-rethinkdb
I've also made a sample chat application that can be found here:
https://github.com/d-snp/celluloid-rethinkdb-chat
It's something that I have been longing to do as well, to integrate old "legacy" Rails code. Here is the best way I have found:
Since you would not be using any of Rails router/controller/views, but just the ability to read data and push it to the client, I recommend you use Rails to create JSON apis to the database, and deploy the code, then in Meteor you can consume the data via the http package, this would happen on the server at a regular interval and populate the MongoDB with the normalized data you need, then it would serve the browser client.
I am working on such an application that will keep a normalized version of the data in Mongo, and a relational version of the data in mySql (through Rails) this way I can preserve the legacy Rails functionality that I dont want to rewrite in JS, and get the benefit of Meteor for the one page that I need it most.
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.
I'm very new to web programming (or actually, very old to it, since the last time I messed with the web was HTML 1.1), but now need to deploy a web application quickly. It seems like every time I turn around, there's new acronyms and technologies to learn (JSON, XMLRPC, GWT, Javascript, Rails, etc).
Here's what my app must do:
Given a username and password, authenticate (easy enough, everything does that, apparently).
Allow the user to upload a large glob of data for processing.
Process that data.
Allow the user to download their processed data.
I've already got Java scripts and a database for handling the data. On one machine, I can run a series of command-line programs to process an incoming datablock and put the results back into a mysql database. That is already present and working.
I want to construct a web front-end to this task, using these existing and tested methods. I'm currently leaning to this approach:
Have two machines, a database machine and a web server. That approach allows for later scalability, if necessary, but also requires that I can't assume that the programs that I use to access the data and manipulate it are locally stored.
Use a Ruby DRb application to create a server and a client. The client would pass data to the server which would in turn call these applications.
Use some other Ruby interface to interact with the DRb for the web frontend.
Here's my problem: it looks like most Ruby applications for the web automatically try to build some kind of local database. All the Rails tutorials I've found start with making your own database and interacting with that, which is exactly what I don't want to do.
Is Rails the right technology for me, or using Ruby DRb? Is there some other technology I should be exploring?
If Rails or Ruby is the Right Thing here, what should I be looking at? I already have the Programming Ruby book, and have used that for some of the backend stuff as well as getting basic DRb stuff working.
Sounds like Rails might be a bit heavyweight for your situation. Perhaps Sinatra might be a better fit? It's an ultra-lightweight framework: a hello world app might look something like:
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
"Hello World!"
end
Rails is fine. You can have development and test databases on your local machine and the production database on a remote machine. It doesn't have to be the web server. Get a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails. It'll teach you all you need to know.
I am planning to write some new UI code and many people suggested to use RoR. But from what I have read about RoR so far, it seems to be almost mandatory to have a database to store the backend data. In my case, I do not have access to a database and all my data objects are available through web services (some REST and SOAP services).
I think I have to use the controller to directly talk to the services in this case, but is it still a good idea to use RoR without the model layer (ActiveRecord).
Are there any other frameworks more suited for this kind of approach (I can use anything in Java or Ruby, we do not have any PHP or Python code).
Rails will work just fine for this; it explicitly supports running without ActiveRecord. See the comment in the default environment.rb file:
# Skip frameworks you're not going to use. To use Rails without a database
# you must remove the Active Record framework.
# config.frameworks -= [ :active_record, :active_resource, :action_mailer ]
Your database.yml file will be ignored if you don't load ActiveRecord; all of your models can inherit from ActiveResource::Base and will work just fine.
If web services is all you do, then I would recommend sinatra. Sinatra makes applications that work on web services a breeze. If you would like a similar approach on the client with fragment URLs, check out sammy. They are both awesome for building web applications which have non-traditional data sources.