I've decided that I'm going to write an API for my music site. Something that I really want is to implement REST when creating my API. If I wanted the functionality to say, play the next song via the API, how would I go about doing this?
As far as my constructed URL would go, would it be something like API/{ID}/NextSong, API/{ID}/?NextSong, or API/{ID}?NextSong. Or would it be something a bit different than that?
As far as the code side goes, I plan on have the web service running in PHP. I would need some sort of authentication step. What would be the best way to authenticate a user with the API? (I'd imagine that there is probably a really good online resource or something for this.)
Finally, the music player is in HTML5 and Javascript/jQuery. What's the best way to get the player to actually go to the next song using the web service? I have a nextSong() javascript function, but I'm not sure how to access it. The only thing I can think of is some sort of polling, be it AJAX long-polling, or just timed polling. Is there any other better, more efficient way of doing this?
Thanks for any help, all I really need is a push in the right direction, a lot of what I know so far is due to my experience with Microsoft's listdata.svc RESTful webservice in Sharepoint 2010. The rest of my knowledge is restricted to this article about REST APIs in PHP.
If you have an URL with "NextSong" in it that would mean you would have to have every users state saved on the server. If I would have a player and work with AJAX against a REST-API I would let the server just be "stupid servant" that does everything I tell it to do and let the logic be on the client side.
For example I would have a service for getting a playlist in JSON or XML format. Parse this on the client. When you listen to a song in that playlist you know where in the playlist you are and when the users or player asks for the next song the musicplayer will look in the playlist (saved in array of objects maybe a linked list where you have properties for previous song and next song?), call the service for start playing song id #####. For example API/{ID}/Play/{SongID} or API/{ID}/Song/{SongID}.
Regards
(EDIT Fixed Typo)
Related
I am a PHP developer and the title basically says it all. However I was hoping on some more in-depth information as I am starting to get confused about how the flow for the project I work on should go.
For an (web) application I need to implement a feature like Facebook does it with notifying users about replies/comments and instantly showing these.
I figured I could use long-polling with ajax requests but this does not seem to be a nice solution as the notifications never really are instant and it is resource heavy.
So I should use some form of sockets if I understand correctly, and Node.Js would be a good choice. So based on the last assumption I now get confused about the work flow.
I thought about two possible solutions:
1) It seems to me, that if I would use Node.Js I could skip using PHP at all and base the application on Node.js only.
2) Or I could use PHP as a base and only use Node.js for notifying users and instantly showing messages but saving the data using PHP and Mysql.
These two possibilities confuse me and I can't make up my mind about what would be the "best" and cleanest way.
I do not have much experience in Node.js, played with it for a while. But managing and saving data seems to be hard in Node.js so that is why I came up with option 2.
I know Facebook is build on PHP so I am assuming that they save the data via PHP and notify / instantly show replies and comments via Node.
Could someone help me out on this?
Thanks in advance!
EDIT:
I just noticed, Stackoverflow does something similar. I get a notification in the upper left, and below my question a box with "new answer to this question". I am really interested in the technologie(s) used.
Well you could use node.js for the notifications and PHP for your app.
By googling I found this about real-time-notifications.
You could also just use node.js with socket.io, but this means that you have to learn new technologies as you mention that you have no experience with node.
I haven't used it but you could check this project, for websockets in PHP.
When you have an update that you want to notify users you can use the publish subscriber pattern to notify the intrested in this update.
Take a look in Gearman too.
Personally, I've built a notification system using the pubsub mechanism of redis, with node.js+socket.io. Everytime that there is an update on a record then there is a publish on the appropriate channel. If the channel has listeners then they will be notified. I also store the last 20 notifications in a Redis list.
The appplication is built in PHP. The notification system is built in node.js. They are different applications that see the same data. The communication occurs via redis. For example in the Facebook context:
1) A user updates his status.
2) PHP stores this to the database and Redis
3) Redis knows that this update must publish to the status channel of the specific user and it does.
4) All the friends of the specific user are listening to his status channel (here comes node.js)
5) Node.js pushes the notification in the browser with socket.io
As for facebook, I have read in an article that is using long polling for supporting older browsers. Not sure for this though, needs citation...
AFAIK It would be via two simple methods :
First one that could be very simple is adding a Boolean column to each record that determines if it has been notified or not.
The second method is creating a table to insert all notifications.
However, I'm not sure if there are alternative methods for better performance, But first method is what I do commonly myself. But I think Facebook is using 2nd method, because it has to notify each one to a lot of users.
Your question maybe dublicate of:
Facebook like notifications tracking (DB Design)
Database design to store notifications to users
You could use Server Side Events it involves a bit of JavaScript but nothing overly complicated I think.
The main bulk of this method is PHP though, so you would just use the PHP to query your DB for notifications and SSE will push them to the user.
It does have some limitations though, most notably it's not supported by IE (huge surprise) thought i'd mention it anyway to let you know of other possibilities.
Hope this helps
Im developing a very simple native Android App containing a simple Main Menu with the Today, Yesterday, This Week, This Month and Search by Date options.
(I bought the lynda course: "Building Android and iOS Apps with Dreamweaver" with HTML5 and with the design and functionality of the app im not having too much trouble.)
What i entend with this app is this: i will write famous people profiles every day (between 1 and 5). So when people click (for example) in the Today option they will access to the profiles list that i have created for today (Yesterday and others is a check on the past written profiles from database).
So imagine that some android user clicked on today and will be presented with 3 profiles options ("Brad Pitt", "Shakira" and "Cristiano Ronaldo"), that i need the app to access my server database to update it (the "Today" profiles).
and finally...
Before the questions i want to say that i have searched on stackoverflow and found very similar answers, but im a novice on programming and when i'm reading the answers they can differ so much that i got confused going link on link documentation.
The Questions:
I want to create somekind of method that i could have a template with different profiles (Singer, Politician, Soccer Player) and click on somekind of button to start a new profile/article with Born Date, Occupation, Nationality, Biography and etc. Its this possible? How can i do it and in wich programming language?
What kind of server and what kind of database do i have to create and how to configure it to send the info to my app?
There is any server specifications that i must have for this to work the smoother and easiest possible? For this issue price is not a problem.
What kind of code should i write on my app so that it could get the "3 profiles update for today" from my website?
Its possible to show me some code example that would work with this simple step in my app of selectiong "Today" button on main menu and the app check for new profiles for today and present the user as an option? Because if i had this bit of code i could understand better how to do the rest with the profile details on the "Brad Pitt" option for example.
Hope you understood my questions. Thanks in advance. Have a nice day
Assuming that you're using the Phonegap Framework to develop your application, I would do it like so:
First of all get a Server/Webspace capable of running PHP Scripts and a MySQL Database.
You also have to rethink the way these applications work, for example you can't
configure it to send the info to my app
You need a Server Side Script (i would choose PHP for this, it's easy to learn and available on almost every Server). This PHP Script then queries your MySQL Database where all the information about the people is stored. On thing to remember is that your Clients will poll the server and request the content, you're not actively sending anything to Clients unless requested, that's just the way how HTTP works. The interface your Script is providing there is called a REST Interface.
Have a look at the link, it explains everything pretty good. Your output format should be JSON this makes it really nice to work with in the Client App later on. To do things like "what was posted today?" Have a look at how SQL Queries work and implement it in your Script.
Now for the client you can access this data by using JavaScript, most likely jQuery to simplify everything a bit. Use the jQuery $.getJSON function to access the data provided by your REST Interface. Now you can use basic jQuery to wrap this data up with HTML to present it to the user. I know that this is not "example code" or anything you requested, but it should point you into the right direction on how to achieve something like you want to do. Just do a google search for all the keywords listed above and keep reading about it, then you should be able to build a app like that.
I have some skills in PHP and now I'm planning to develop a connect function for remote login to my web side. I can't find any useful on Google.
Some idees on how to code a API connect button? Something similiar to Facebook connect, Twitter connect etc. BUT this should not rely on facebook api. I'm going to make my own stand alone api.
I know I need to use REST in backend, but I'm missing the knowledge to know how to send / recive the login data, and how to know when a user are online or not.
I also know that the user will need a key of some sort.
My plan was something so easy as this:
yourdomain.com/api?id=xx&key=xxx&what=
then what is should be the action with som parameters like:
if($what == login) {
handle the login part here
return the data
}
I can handle the php on the server side, but don't have a clue on how to handle the rest except the remote site must get the data in json or xml format and save in database.
Then when connect, it sends some data back to my site.
But HOW?? Here I'm stuck.
Also how to figure out when user are online on the other site or not, and how to get the image for a button. Like Facebook have a blue icon.
I guess it's a call back to my site for getting the image from there, right?
Greatfull for any answers on this one.
Its a pretty large topic you have there, you'll need to do some research as there are many many ways and technologies and security aspects related to this.
I'd suggest you go with a secure connection on a SOAP service based off Zend Soap Server and Zend Soap Client. But then again, if you don't want to use ZEND or SOAP, you'll have to look at other methods.
I wouldnt use REST because REST is used to manage data such as PUT/POST = UPDATE/INSERT, DELETE = DELETE, GET = SELECT so i don't really recon this would make sense.
My biggest point i have to make is, MAKE APIS, something simple, you don't want people to have to ask you for help or read documentation on how to access your authentication service. Go something simple, clean, portable and provide API to simplify your user's experience.
My 2 cents :P
I'm creating a network of websites that should communicate between themselves, for example to let all of them display an article published on one of them, or display data stored in a database of another subdomain, etc...
And this all using ajax for interactivity.
Which could be the best (and simplest) way to achieve this?
I thought an ajax call could summon a php script that could call another script on another subdomain. Is it the right way?
Thanks
I don't know exactly what you want to do. If you control the sites and server you could save all your users a lot of ajax calls if you skip doing it that way and do it on the server itself.
If you display all the articles by using javascript, users without javascript won't see anything and search engines won't be able to crawl the website.. however, maybe that's what you want.
The correct design pattern for something like this is to implement a restful API that all the other sites read from..
So you have a central API on eg. http://api.example.com/
and when a server wants to display an article, he would do something on the back end to retrieve an article list.. eg.
http://api.example.com/retrieveNewestArticles
that would return eg. a json variable with a list of the newest article.. then when you want to display that article, you would call:
http://api.example.com/showArticle/58484
That's how I would do it at least.
Some people might suggest doing it by making all the websites connect directly to the same database. That's an option, a bit more messy in the long run, but will get the job done.
certainly easier than my suggestion.
I'd like to create an application where when a Super user clicks a link the users should get a notification or rather a content like a pdf for them to access on the screen.
Use Case: When a teacher wants to share a PDF with his students he should be able to notify his students about the pdf available for download and a link has to be provided to do the same.
There are several ways you can accomplish this. The most supported way is through a technique called Comet or long-polling. Basically, the client sends a request to the server and the server doesn't send a response until some event happens. This gives the illusion that the server is pushing to the client.
There are other methods and technologies that actually allow pushing to the client instead of just simulating it (i.e. Web Sockets), but many browsers don't support them.
As you want to implement this in CakePHP (so I assume it's a web-based application), the user will have to have an 'active' page open in order to receive the push messages.
It's worth looking at the first two answers to this, but also just think about how other sites might achieve this. Sites like Facebook, BBC, Stackoverflow all use techniques to keep pages up to date.
I suspect Facebook just uses some AJAX that runs in a loop/timer to periodically pull updates in a way that would make it look like push. If the update request is often enough (short time period), it'll almost look realtime. If it's a long time period it'll look like a pull. Finding the right balance between up-to-dateness and browser/processor/network thrashing is the key.
The actual request shouldn't thrash the system, but the reply in some applications may be much bigger. In your case, the data in each direction is tiny, so you could make the request loop quite short.
Experiment!
Standard HTTP protocol doesn't allow push from server to client. You can emulate this by using for example AJAX requests with small interval.
Have a look at php-amqplib and RabbitMQ. Together they can help you implement AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). Essentially your web page can be made to update by pushing a message to it.
[EDIT] I recently came across Pusher which I have implemented for a project. It is a HTML5 WebSocket powered realtime messaging service. It works really well and has a free bottom tier plan. It's also extremely simple to implement.
Check out node.js in combination with socket.io and express. Great starting point here