I have been search for a few days now for a way to work on this.
Basically I could like to send flashvars to my swf file using some backend language like PHP or Python, then execute it and capture the output.
I looked up to Ming but it seems that this is only a lib for create SWF file, not much on manipulate already created file.
Thank you!
If you need to do it 'on load basis', you can simply provide flash vars (for example put some flashvars depending on situation and embed the swf into html).
But if you need to have almost real time control over the flash, you have a few options:
socket connections - very hard (not to say impossible) to implement with php, and a kind of complex job
make the swf make a call to php, and get some information; then execute what you need depending on that information
I would advise you to use the second option - chose the action depending on situation, and let the swf client get it itself (either save it in file, db or calculate it realtime - it's up to you; the important is that you don't pass it to client, client makes query to get it).
Related
I am just stuck a little in making a choice between PHP chart Lib and JavaScript Chart Lib. I do understand that PHP if for the server side and Javascript for the client side. My problem is what difference does it make when using their charting libraries. Is it performance issue or what?
I want to understand the difference in using PHP chart Libs and JavaScript Chart Libs. Please am not looking for examples of their chart libraries. I am looking for why i should choose one over the other.
I tried to google 'php chart vs javascript chart' but didn't get any links that can give me
the difference.
EDIT 1
1)
If this question has been answered before, then point me there.
2)
Am developing the application for internet
EDIT 2
1)
I have found out about PHPChart PHPChart which has both PHP source code and JavaScript source code. If anyone has experience in that library, does it may be solve the problem of server side load (bandwidth issues) etc.. I am thinking since it has both the PHP and JavaScript source then it may be the best to use. Am just assuming. :-)
Thank you very much
Both ways of creating graphs have their own pros and cons.
If you decide to do it using PHP, first you need to make sure that you have all the required graphical libraries installed (e.g. GD, which might not always available on shared hosts).
Assuming you have them, the first negative thing in my opinion is that you will end up with static images. Of course, it's not always a bad thing, as that ensures compatibility with all the clients, be those with or without javascript support, however, it takes away the dynamics of graphs generated on the client side using javascript. Your users won't be able to zoom, move, slide, full screen or do anything that they could with the likes of Highcharts or Flot.
Another con is that images take up more bandwidth than, say, JSON. The bigger you want to have your graph, the more colors it contains, the longer your clients will have to wait till your page loads. And just because those loads are not asynchronous, they will have to wait for the images to load before they will see the rest of the page.
With javscript libraries everything is different though. You only request the data required for your graph and you only request it when your page loads. The amount of data is usually smaller than an image would be plus you can compress your output with GZ to make it even smaller. Users will see nice spinners informing them that the graph is loading instead of some incomplete webpage.
Another thing to take into account is - what if you decide to show a nice table with data in them below each graph? If you chose to render images on the server, you would end up having to add new functionality just to get the data. With JSON, however, you just make one call, render the graph and display the table. Maybe calculate totals or do whatever you want with it. Hand it out to people as an API if you wish, after all :)
If you ask me, I would definitely go with client-side graphs as most of the devices have nice HTML5 support nowadays and being able to display a graph on an Android phone, or an iPhone or an iPad shouldn't pose a problem. If you only need images and you don't wish to expose the original data, go with PHP.
My opinion is that having a server side solution (i.e. php) takes away any browser compatibility issues you may have with a client side solution (i.e. javascript) and hence support issues.
A benfit of using JS is that it does offload resources from your server to the client because you may only have to generate some light weight data (e.g. JSON , XML) and the rendering occurs on the client. You will have to investigate how many hits your server is likely to get, etc to determine if resource is an isuse with PHP or JS.
However, using Php to create images of charts you can always get around the performance/resource issue by using a cache of the image files and serving from the cache (it's a just a folder of images) instead of generating a new one. Whether you cna use a cache will depend on your usage. If clients require up to the second data and its always changing, obviously a cache may not be of use.
Here's what I see :
Using PHP
Increase load on the server for the request
Will work everywhere
Also, like someone said here and made me think of it, you can cache the image that PHP give you, reducing bandwith (no lib to download) and reducing load (cache)
Using Javascript
Decrease load but increase the bandwitch and addition http request (to load the JS lib)
Will work where JS is available
But remember, PHP take more load then an HTTP request.
Also, always remember, Javascript is made for effects and specials stuffs you need to display.
There is one PHP render advantage that no one told about. Since sometime you need to include chart as image into PDF, DOC, XLS etc. file or email it – you have no other way except to render chart on server and store it as image to be inserted.
For data manipulation you use PHP.
For visual and behavioral effects you use JavaScript.
For that reason, you should use Javascript as its designed for visual behavior. Plus it will put less load on your server as all processing will be client side. As more people use your application simultaneously, it will start to slow down as your server will be doing a lot more then it has to.
Hope that helps :)
I'm a C++ programmer and I'm new to web development.
I need to figure out how I can log/dump the html of a dynamic 3rd party website to a static html file on my computer, every second?
The dynamic webpage refreshes every second and updates a html table with latest price info. I would like a static snapshot of this table (or the whole html page) to be saved to disk every second. That way I can parse the file with my own program and add the updated price info to a database.
How do I do this?
If I cant do it this way, is there a way to eves drop (and log) on the the post/get messages and replies the dynamic webpage sends?
Look into the cURL Library. I believe Scraping the content from a website, and doing your processing/business logic, then inserting or updating your database would be the most efficient way to do it, rather than saving the files contents to disk.
Alternatively, file_get_contents() works pretty well assuming you have allow_url_fopen enabled.
It would be easy to do with Selenium Webdriver. You can use Selenium to create a browser object with a method, getPageSource, that pulls the entire HTML from the page, but it doesn't seem there are any C++ bindings for Selenium. If it's convenient to use Ruby, Python, or Java as part of your application, just in order to open up a browser or headless browser and pull the data, then you should be able to set up a web service or a local file to transfer that data back into your C++ application.
Web automation from C++ addresses the challenge of no Selenium C++ bindings
Or, alternately you could write your own C++ bindings for Selenium (probably more difficult)
However -- for simply pulling the HTML, you may not need Selenium if one of Dan's answers above will work.
Hej someone else.
insed of running there page every second to record there data so you can have a updated
view of there prices, why not call there web service directly (the one there ajax call makes)
Gl
How can you bring in a path as a variable from php? I have hundreds of mp3 file names stored in a My SQL database and I want to call the name, load it into a variable and then have it replace the URL in the call to the sound file. I am all set with the PHP and database side of things, but I have been frustrated with the Flash part. I think it would just involve passing a variable from php to flash. The web pages we are building would eventually have 10 - 15 files per page and each one would have a different sound file and a different image that you could click to trigger the sound. First click would start the file and the second would stop the sound. The images and sound files are all stored in the database.
I found this code on another post and it is basically what I want to do. Still missing the button part, but if I can figure out the variable from PHP I think it will open up a bunch of new options.
var soundRequest:URLRequest = "path/to/file.mp3"; //the path would be a variable passed from the database to php and then to the actionscript
var s:Sound = new Sound(soundRequest);
var sChannel = s.play(0, int.MAX_VALUE); //Causes it to repeat by the highest possible number to flash.
//Above starts the sound immediatly (Streaming);
//Now to wait for completion instead, pretend we didnt start it before.
s.addEventLister(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, onSComplete, false, 0, true);
function onSComplete(e:Event):void
{
var sChannel = s.play(0, int.MAX_VALUE); //Causes it to repeat by the highest possible
}
If you have a click to trigger on the page then you should use Javascript to Flash communication on the page. One flash file and a communication to flash which file to play. With anything flash these days you've probably heard of SWFobject and with Javascript you've probably heard of jQuery. Well what you need is very well documented in the jQuery SWFObject
plugin.
There is a standalone example here.
http://jquery.thewikies.com/swfobject/example_flashInteract.html
It would make sense to send all the file names from PHP to AS3 and store them in an Array, after that everything can be handled on the client side.
You need to check for Flash / PHP communication , there are loads of tutorials available on the net. Here's an example.
Output mySQL data as XML with PHP
The basic idea is to call a PHP script which should return your mp3 information as XML or JSON. I personally favor JSON but you will need to download a library.
as3 corelib
After the data has been retrieved , you can create ValueObjects
Populating Value Objects with web service XML
You should end up with an Array of ValueObjects which can then assign to your various images.
You could create a specific class for each image that would take as parameter a ValueObject.
For more info on AS3 , go here
I'm working on a biology web based application and trying to figure out what language to use. The features I need to include are:
Image viewing frame - This area will display the current image that the biologists wish to see. The application needs to take in a number of coordinates from a file and draw those points on the image displayed here. When the biologist wishes to change images there needs to be no flickering from the refresh. Will do this using multiple image buffers probably. Content needs to be scrollable and able to be zoomed in.
There need to be labeled buttons that advance, step back, zoom, and play the images displaying in the image frame. There also needs to be some type of list view where images titles can be selected to be displayed.
There will be a bunch of folders of images on the server that can be selected from. The application must allow the user to select which folder of images to be loaded. It also must be able to read from either an txt or xml file and visually display the information there by way of line graph.
Would like to be able to run scripts on the server from the application.
I feel that all these things are doable by a web application but I have no idea what language to use. Most people recommend php, but i don't want to delve deeper until I know what its limitations are. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance.
-Mike
PHP can do everything you need for the back end, but most of the stuff that you describe is UI based, and this is dependent on the client, which is, of course, the browser. For highly graphical projects, you can do a lot in JavaScript and some JavaScript libraries have a lot of these capabilities built in. You might also consider Flash or Flex.
You might even consider a desktop application that runs outside of the browser. You can use Java, which is easy to deploy, but still requires the user to have the Java Runtime Engine, or you could go with a language that you can compile down to a native application.
Regardless of the front end technology that you choose, you'll still need a back end, and PHP can handle this.
You will find almost every server side platforms such as php , asp.net, asp, etc will do all of the above.
PHP is a language that resides on the server and handles all requests. Javascript (and associated libraries) is a language which is executed by the client's browser and handles (almost) all interaction. PHP is definitely able to do what you want, but for the interaction stuff (particularly the zoom, scrolling, etc.), you'll also need to use Javascript.
So, short answer, PHP is good, but you're going to need to use client-side scripting as well.
PHP is more than capable of doing this. You are going to need to use it in combination with some Javascript to handle the client side effects you describe. I would look into modifying galerific for your needs and then whip up some javascript to write points over the images.
From your concerns about image refresh/flicker, it really sounds like a desktop app is what you are looking for, for a rapid response on image changes. The requirements on this really seem to need to be defined better before you can choose a language... PHP can do all the server side stuff you mentioned, but you might have a harder time getting the image viewing "frame" to provide the functionality you want.
Due to the image manipulation requirements it might be easier to go with something like flash with a php backend or asp.net with silverlight. It might be difficult to prevent flicker and delays with using pure javascript as opposed to flash/silverlight.
Image viewing frame
This will most likely need to be done on the client side using tools/frameworks such as jQuery, the canvas element, silverlight, or any of the other 100's that are out there.
There need to be labeled buttons that advance, step back, zoom, and play the images displaying in the image frame. There also needs to be some type of list view where images titles can be selected to be displayed.
PHP or any other server-side scripting language could pull this off. If this is meant to be a quick project running on free/cheap hardware then PHP would be a good choice. If the plan is a large application that will have to be maintained over the course of many years and hosting/price is not an issue then I would suggest something like ASP.NET
There will be a bunch of folders of images on the server that can be selected from. The application must allow the user to select which folder of images to be loaded. It also must be able to read from either an txt or xml file and visually display the information there by way of line graph.
Again any server side language could do the folder listing portion. As for reading files and creating graphs, this would most likely be a combination of server side and client side programming. jQuery for example, has plugins that could quite easily take a xml file and create a line graph.
Would like to be able to run scripts on the server from the application.
PHP, ASP.NET - both could do this. I'm sure many others could, but these are the ones i use most often
The issue with PHP is that quite often, the code turns into a mess over time. This is maybe not so much an issue with the language as the people using it and the purpose the app was built for (a quick, one time project). Classic ASP also has the same issues.
ASP.NET is a good combination of OOP programming that allows you to separate presentation from logic with minimal effort.
I'm sure this has been asked before, but as I can't seem to find a good answer, here I am, asking... again. :)
Is there any way, using only a mixture of HTML, JavaScript/AJAX, and PHP, to report the actual progress of a file upload?
In reply to anyone suggesting SWFUpload or similar:
I know all about it. Been down that road. I'm looking for a 100% pure solution (and yes, I know I probably won't get it).
Monitoring your file uploads with PHP/Javascript requires the PECL extension:
uploadprogress
A good example of the code needed to display the progress to your users is:
Uber Uploader
If I'm not mistaken it uses JQuery to communicate with PHP.
You could also write it yourself, It's not that complex.
Add a hidden element as the first element of upload form, named UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER.
Poll a PHP script that calls uploadprogress_get_info( UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER )
It return an array containing the following:
time_start - The time that the upload began (unix timestamp),
time_last - The time that the progress info was last updated,
speed_average - Average speed in bytes per second,
speed_last - Last measured speed in bytes per second,
bytes_uploaded - Number of bytes uploaded so far,
bytes_total - The value of the Content-Length header sent by the browser,
files_uploaded - Number of files uploaded so far,
est_sec - Estimated number of seconds remaining.
Let PHP return the info to Javascript and you should have plenty of information.
Depending on the audience, you will likely not use all the info available.
If you have APC installed (and by this point, you really should; it'll be standard in PHP6), it has an option to enable upload tracking.
There's some documentation, and Rasmus has written a code sample that uses YUI.
If you're able to add PECL packages into your PHP, there is the uploadprogress package.
The simplest way would be to just use swfupload, though.
Is there any way, using only a mixture of HTML, JavaScript/AJAX, and PHP, to report the actual progress of a file upload?
I don't know of any way to monitor plain HTML (multipart/form-data) file uploads in webserver-loaded PHP.
You need to have access to the progress of the multipart/form-data parser as the data comes in, but this looks impossible because the ways of accessing the HTTP request body from PHP ($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA and php://input) are documented as being “not available with enctype="multipart/form-data"”.
You could do a script-assisted file upload in Firefox using an upload field's FileList to grab the contents of a file to submit in a segmented or non-multipart way. Still a bunch of work to parse though.
(You could even run a PHP script as a standalone server on another port just for receiving file uploads, using your own HTTP-handling code. But that's a huge amount of work for relatively little gain.)
I'd recommend you to five FancyUpload a try it's a really cool solution for progress bar and it's not necesarely attached to php. Checkout also the other tools at digitarald.de
cheers
IMHO, this is the problem that Web browsers should solve. We have progress meter for downloads, so why not for uploads as well?
Take a look at this for example:
http://www.fireuploader.com/