Is it a good practice to develop web-service and web-site in two different languages, on two different servers? E.g. right now I create a Java web-service running on Glassfish and Ruby on Rails presentation layer running in the same server.
I'd like to leave web-service on the same server but use Ruby 1.9, running in Passenger.
Is it a good idea? I don't have experience in architecture of web-apps.
If you write a contract first web service that consumes and produces XML, you can talk to any client that can make an HTTP GET or POST request in the appropriate format. SOAP or REST, doesn't matter.
I've written Java/Spring web services that started with an XSD. A Yahoo UI RIA client took the WSDL, made an HTTP POST to send the request document, and displayed the XML response in a nice data grid.
Technically, yes you can most certainly do that. That is one of the advantages of using WS. They are interoperable.
However, I would give some consideration to the thought if someone else were to maintain it and has expertise in only one of the two platforms (RoR or Java). It is always best to ask :-)
In terms of the architecture of the system, yes, this is a "good practice". By good, I mean that it achieves the goals, does no harm, and enforces separation of concerns.
I've been developing on an architecture that has a similar structure. The user interface is .NET and uses Java Web Services. That web services then are responsible for all interaction with the persistence media, third party components, etc.
I'd say in any system you should be working to abstract your user interface logic from your business logic. It's just good separation of concerns. Using web services to do that is just one way to achieve that goal. I'd recommend using web services in the case that you will re-use those business services in other use cases in your system.
One more thing; after using two different technologies on the UI and WS for the last 8 years, I've learned that most of the challenges are organizational, not technical. For example, it's harder to find those new developers that have both skills you're looking for to maintain your app. You end up having to find an expert on one and then train them on the other technology.
It depends on how similar they are.
If your web service basically mirrors your website in functionality - then it makes a lot of sense to reuse existing code and thus to make them the same thing on the same server.
Note - this is not the same thing as entangling tiers as your views are still separate from your business logic.
From the Ruby-on-Rails perspective, the "web service" and "web-site" are often interchangeable as they are exactly the same code, with only the view-template differing (html for the website, xml for the web service).
If you build with a RESTful architecture in mind from the beginning, then you can achieve this with the minimum of duplication and with all application layers correctly decoupled.
Related
The community of developers using odata for their REST implementations seem to be the least of all the REST implementations that I usually come across.
Any reasons?
There is virtually no contract. A service consumer has no idea how to use the service (for example, what are valid Command arguments, encoding expectations, and so on).
The interface errs on the side of being too liberal in what it will accept.
The contract does not provide enough information to consumers on how to use the service. If a consumer must read something other than the service’s signature to understand how to use the service, the factoring of the service should be reviewed.
Consumers are expected to be familiar with the database and table structures prior to consuming the Web service. This results in a tight coupling between service providers and consumers.
Performance will suffer due to dependencies on late binding and encoding/decoding between boundaries within the same service.
Source: https://docs.servicestack.net/why-not-odata
OData is a great standard to expose datasets with good tool support (Excel, Tableau, PowerBI...).
As far as I'm concerned it saved me a lot of time and effort, projecting/sorting/filtering... being available out of the box without having to code anything (especially with .net). It's my go to option for RESTful APIs on table like structures.
I had an interesting conversation with a contractor from one of the major outsourcing companies the other day. He has built restful APIs for many customers and when I asked if he used OData sometimes, he replied 'we don't do OData, we prefer Json' (sigh...).
So I guess one of the possible answers to your question is ignorance, many simply don't know OData or understand it...
I am trying to get the data of UserProfiles from SharePoint 2010 site using Objective-C within xCode.Now I am using the SOAP service in my project. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction here? Thank you....
You probably mean "iOS" or "Cocoa" instead of Xcode.
If possible, avoid SOAP. It's much easier to access a web service via REST and using JSON as transport format - and in 99.8% of all use cases, a RESTful web service and JSON will fulfill all your requirements up to 100%.
What you need to accomplish your task can be summarized into "networking development", which involves NSURLConnection (and related friend classes), and NSJSONSerialization and a few other system classes depending on your needs.
Unless you stay with a RESTful web service and JSON and moderate requirements, networking may become quickly complex. And it becomes unnecessarily complex when using SOAP. Possibly you may want to utilize a third party library which may help here.
I'm assuming you are already familiar with the basic major principles when programming in Objective-C and for Mac OS X and iOS. So, I would suggest to start with reading examples from the Apple docs involving networking and utilizing NSURLConnection (e.g. MVCNetworking).
When using node.js to e.g. serve requests for a backbone.js front end, would node.js actually have your applications business logic or would it make calls out to your web service backend written in say Rails or Java?
If it makes calls out to Rails/Java, how would this be done? Confused as it is single threaded.
Your business logic will be written in Javascript. I use Node.js + Backbone.js in conjunction with each other on two different projects. Node is great for writing a backend ReSTful API quick and easy and Backbone.js is great for keeping my client side logic organized.
Like any web tech, a separation between client/server is still essential, but Node allows you to think/write in one language and use the same libraries both server and client side. There are many advantages to this in small shops, as the there is no longer a divide between the "front end" guys and the "back end" guys.
Node's single threaded nature is a turn off to a lot of new comers... its easily overcome with multiple proc instances and a load balancer. (If you even need all that... Node is built on an event model and can handle quite the load before you need to think about running another instance... of course this is completely dependent upon if you're writing good asynchronous code)
Is this to say Node.js + Backbone.js is the best answer for YOUR project? No. But you should weigh out the advantages of using Node over Rails/Java/PHP/Python before you make a decision. For me it was simple when considering RAD... one language, one set of libs... its my favorite web stack thus far.
I am beginning work on an individual project to bring an existing product out of the dark ages of classic ASP and into the light. My biggest decision to make before embarking on this lengthy journey is determining what frameworks and methodology I will implement for the new design.
Right now I am looking at MVC or MVVM (from what I gather this is just Silverlight?) for the web interface, Entity Framework or something I write myself as the model and MSSQL as the data.
Unfortunately I am just a fledgling programmer and I am not particularly aware of trends in the world of programming in general. I don't know what is just a passing fad and what technologies actually have lasting potential. I would really like to use something that is likely to remain relevant for some time. So I am looking to the professionals here for input on ideas that worked for you, pitfalls to watch out for and things to keep an eye on.
I appreciate any and all suggestions, keeping in mind that using the Microsoft and .Net is something of a prerequisite. I really want to make sure I am headed in the right direction before I start as this will probably take several months.
As for frameworks I personally suggest:
ASP.NET MVC 3 of MVC 4, depending on the question if beta software is allowed.
Entity Framework 4.3 or 5.0. 5.0 is a lot faster (is has auto compilation) but it's still a Release Candidate.
AutoMapper to map between Entities and ViewModels.
Ninject for dependency injection (useful if you want to write unit tests).
JQuery for stuff like clientside validation (integrates perfectly with ASP.NET MVC).
Possible some CSS framework like Bootstrap.
Maybe RestSharp so you can easily perform requests.
In case it's a cloud service (most SaaS are) and you'd like to host it on Azure (brilliant integration with the .NET stack) you'll need the Azure SDK.
As for software achitecture:
Use service layers
Use the repository patterns
Use ViewModels to pass to your view instead of entities
Set up a dependency injection container
That's my advice, I personally find this a golden combination for building enterprise applications (while not wasting too much time configuring lots of things).
Pitfalls:
I don't know if unit testing is really necessary. I should definately keep it in mind while setting up the architecture, but I personally choose to do that later because I don't even know if my product will succeed, so I can better put my time in building a fast Minimal Viable Product.
Don't assume anything. You can waste months of your precious time working on a cool feature that you think everyone will like, but often this is not the case. Do just the absolutely required minimum, and improve it later if your users like it.
I will add more to #Leon suggestions as I see those suggestion are great from application framework perspective, while I wanted to write here from cloud methodology perspective.
As you have chosen SaaS, definitely you are moving completely in Cloud while bring your application and data to cloud all together, that's great!!
There are several layers to any cloud application and to understand lets see what a cloud service stack look like. If we take an example of Windows Azure:
You have Compute, where your application runs with a web server (or not).
You have Azure table store which you can use to store key value pair in a row and then access them very fast.
You have Azure Queue allows decoupling of different parts of a cloud application, enabling cloud applications to be easily built with different technologies and easily scale with traffic needs.
You have Access Control Services to authenticate users through OpenID or AD
You have service bus to connect other services in cloud or on-premise at 3rd party.
You have Azure Blob storage to use as web based flat file server
You have Azure Cache (an in-memory cache build to scale in cloud)
You have SQL Azure as you cloud database
There are many more services which you can explorer and use
So when you decide to move your application from traditional web hosting to cloud you really have to look about how to take advantage of these different cloud services to scale your application when needed and save you lots of money.
With you application in Cloud you try something as below:
Keep you application logic as small as possible
Keep your static content outside the compute
Use cloud based cache for fast access as application scale out
Move data out of traditional RDBMS databases to NoSQL Framework (key-value pair, document etc to save money and flexibility), if possible and applicable
Take advantage of other available services to reduce application complexity
If you consider above aspect in your mind you will create a true cloud based application which will be fast and will save you money.
We've got a bunch of data that we'd like to expose to the world hosted on an asp-net.mvc website. I'd like to ensure that we deliver it using technology that is easy for end developers to implement and not tied to any particular platform, rather than using technology that is unpopular/incompatible with developers.
The kind of requests we expect are mainly to retrieve search results (not many parameters), but down the like we'd like to be able to provide catalogue lookups and the like, which may be more complex.
Bearing this in mind, what is the preferred means of doing this?
Windows Communication Foundation can be used to create both SOAP services (great if your consumers are businesses, using Visual Studio/.NET or Java) or REST services (for people on other platforms). Those are the preferred means of exposing public APIs.
If you want maximum exposure, probably best to use the REST approach, since it is easier to consume from "web" languages like JavaScript. Microsoft has extensive resources on putting together a REST API using WCF.
Honestly, for the kinds of requests you say you need to handle, which all seem to be looking up data as opposed to modifying it, the difference is almost trivial - you can switch from SOAP to REST simply by changing a few attributes/configuration options and you could technically even host both at the same time using very little additional code. As long as you stick to WCF and don't use outdated technology like ASMX/WSE then you will be fine.
Reasons to use REST:
Consumable from almost anywhere (including JavaScript, RSS readers, etc.);
It's popular (in use by Google, Twitter, etc.)
Supports many different data formats (JSON, Atom, etc.)
Reasons to use SOAP:
Standardized security protocol (encryption, non-repudiation, etc.)
Distributed transactions
Message Queuing
That's not an exhaustive list but it should give you an idea of who the target markets are for each. If you're hosting a very open, very public site designed to be consumed by anyone and everyone, go with REST. If the service is part of a business system and you need to guarantee reliability, security, and consistency of data, you'll want to go with SOAP. Choose the appropriate technology based on your target market.
Create a RESTful API. As a developer who often consumes web services, it's what I would expect and prefer.
Many popular services (digg/twitter/netflix/google) are moving to REST over SOAP, so you would be wise to follow suit.
If you do create a REST API you should also create a WADL file. It's WISDL for REST. They're not well supported yet, but they're not hard to create and they'll become more useful as support increases.
YOu will want to check out odata. Look at odata.org and live.visitmix.com/videos
This will give you REST access, metadata support like in SOAP, interoperability with the whole office stack and if you are using WCF Data Services you can implement it in a matter of hours, days at most.
Take a look at netflix.com, they have done it right (IMHO).