I was just curious if anyone has used SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language) and if it's a good standard to use.
We'd need it for synchronising information from a tablet device to a web server (via web service) and vice versa.
Is SyncML too bloated? I was looking at some of the SyncML APIs and was quite daunting. So the big choice is to use this standard or build an in-house solution.
Even if I did do it in-house, we'd have to create some sort of way to define the data we're sending up, so definitely looking at building an XML schema, or alternatively use JSON.
Any opinions? Ideas?
SyncML and ActiveSync (and possibly some other prepared solution) have a signifficant advantage: There are some implementations that are probably stable. Another signifficant advantage is that the protocols are designed and tested. If you design your own protocol, you'll have to think about all possible situations in synchronization. So, even if your own protocol can be a bit simpler, you probably have to do more work and the result can be less stable.
You can create syncml server on php through PHPSyncMl .
Besides,The syncml client can reference android itself .
by the way, these code maybe lost in the after version.
Related
I am working on a task where it is required to distribute live data (being fetched from some other server) to client using sockets. We user drupal as a framework and thus my choice of PHP.
1)I want to know the major factors that should be taken into consideration while developing this server.Like security,authentication,load etc and how should i approach this.Is there any blog/article that could be of help.
2)Is there a better choice than PHP for this?
3)ALSO is there any drupal module that could assist me in this.
I can think about one issue when you are talking about several servers connecting to you, you may want to conceder a nonblock mode.
Because when you are working with blocking mod, each server can connect at the time, meaning that there will be delay delivering the message.
http://il2.php.net/manual/en/function.socket-set-nonblock.php
I think java would be better choise, multi thread may help here.
from my point of view, this is something that you need to develop your self, socket programming needs a lot of attention.
Drupal is a Web CMS, it can be used as framework for advanced web features or light to medium web application that fits well in the traditional HTTP request paradigm. IMHO, distributing live data from multiple servers to client using sockets doesn't fit with the base assumption behind Drupal's design.
PHP can be used to write socket server. It used to be un-common, but it is becoming more and more available. ReactPHP is a non-blocking I/O library/framework suited for socket programing. Racthet is a websocket server in PHP using ReactPHP.
In any case, this would ne nothing like developing a web application with RoR, Drupal, Django, Symfony, etc.
If integration with a Drupal website is required, the Service module is a nice solution to provides a REST or XML-RPC API. Or course, direct access to Drupal's MySQL database is also an option but will probably require more knowledge of the used Drupal modules since you will have to replicate their behaviors and understand how they manage their data (for instance, how a particular CCK field is stored in your database).
Note: Previous version of this answer included reference to the following solutions in other languages: Twisted (Python), EventMachine (Ruby) and Node.js (JavaScript). These are all valid solutions when PHP is not required.
Previous version of the answer also referenced phpsocketdaemon, but nowadays ReactPHP is a more clean and robust solution.
OK, go easy on me as it's my first question here. ;)
I am experienced in Web Application development, but I need to design 2 different desktop applications at work. I need advice on what languages to use (I use PHP for Web Applications, I have little other experience), any frameworks that may help me accomplish this easier and any IDEs to use to make my life easier too.
My first application will essentially be an interface to an embedded or remote DB and essentially it needs to do not much more than CRUD. A fulltext search function will be necessary as will sorting of the CRUD table too. I'd like to include the possibility of hiding columns of data too, but this isn't a priority. I currently use MySQL, but am happy to use any other DB, as long as they support importing from Excel. Of course, if it supports an excel spreadsheet as the database, fantastic, but wishful thinking...
I only need to support Windows XP upwards, this won't change. Let me know if I can add anything to help answer this.
My second application is going to be more complicated, I guess. It needs to output the SHA, MD5, CRC-32, CRC-16 signatures for an entire external drive on-screen and/or into a text document of the users choice (new and append). The external drive could be Compact Flash, EEPROM, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, SD, etc. Whereas I have an idea where to start on the first application, this one is where I need major help as I have no idea which programming language has built-in support for all the algorithms above, or the best way to go about coding it. So any and all advice will be more than welcome.
Edit: OK, so I have come across Titanium and am wondering if this is the best option out there for my 2 projects. The first one I am certain I can achieve, but the second project is going to be pretty difficult I believe, as unlike most hash calculators out there, I do not only need to check individual files for SHA/MD5/CRC-32/CRC-16, but I also need to check Compact Flash through a USB-connected Sandisk CF reader and EEPROMs through a COM or USB connection as well. I essentially need to produce the signature/hash for the entire drive, not the files on it. Any advice on this in particular would be helpful, please let me know if I am going too far off-topic by stackoverflow standards, as I can create a new question with this in.
I'm going to have to say Perl might be a good (though not necessarily the best) option for you, if you aren't one of the PHP developers who are Perl-allergic:
Perl is probably easier for a PHP developer to pick up than some statically typed compiled language that typical desktop apps are written in
Perl has libraries to interface to pretty much ANY database back-end you want, though I'm not 100% sure about using Excel as DB directly (I'm fairly confident something exists in CPAN but can't recommend anything from personal experience).
Perl has Windows GUI development - from an easier (for you) web GUI using local/embedded web server to Tk to Win32 GUI modules (StackOverflow has a couple of questions with very good references on the topic of Perl Windows GUI options).
Perl has a fairly complete set of support for MD5/SHA etc... Again CPAN is your friend.
If the only development experience you have is PHP for web, your options for quick desktop development are seriously limited.
since i don't know of any (sane) way to use PHP for desktop apps, my first thought was to reach for a framework that would let you use JavaScript and a mostly declarative UI. That would save you from most of the pain.
The best one for that would be Qt, which is supposed to let you do almost everything on QML and JavaScript. the unfortunate part is the 'almost'; since anything that escapes that would mean C++ development. The best C++ environment, for sure; but still widely different from Web work (specially PHP web work).
The other option, which I think would be best for you is Adobe AIR. I haven't really checked it; but it lets you write a 'desktop-like' app using only Flash (with or without the Flex framework) or HTML+JavaScript. When i first saw it seemed pretty much complete. For DB work i think it can use an embedded SQLite library; or access any HTTP service (which could be a local DB+PHP app exposing the CRUD methods)
You could try PHP-GTK.
It may not be the fastest, but it does work.
I'm building a PHP web application and I've reached a point that I need to build a Comet server because I need to update my users' whenever a new data is available (pretty much like FB). I've spent so much time searching the web and I've come to a conclusion that the best way to build Comet server is to build it with erlang. Also I've found that apache-php is not a good combination for doing that because the process per request issue.So, I have to build a lightweight http server for comet application.
I'm totally newbie in erlang world but I'm thinking of implementing Comet server in erlang and make it to function as interface for updating the clients only. For the rest of my web application functions, I still want to continue implementing them with PHP. So directing the requests of updating the clients to the erlang server and directing the other requests to apache-php server.
It seems very complicating. I need to know what's the best way to learn erlang for the sake of building Comet server and how to combine the two languages (erlang and php) to work together like when I have new info. to be pushed to the clients, I need to make the new changes available to Comet and then it pushes the info to the users. So how can I benefit from php and erlang and make them work together.
Sorry for the long explanation but I really need your help guys and any guidance you may give me to learn and implement what I want. Thanks a lot in advance.
EDIT:
Should I consider learning Python and Twisted to accomplish what I want?
It's definitely possible to do this with Erlang. One possibility would be to use long polling, which you can do with mochiweb. http://code.google.com/p/mochiweb/
Another idea is to use sockets. Until web sockets are supported by a reasonable number of browsers, you'll have to use a flash "bridge" to create a TCP connection, and use javascript to communicate with the server. Take a look at web socket JS: http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js
Once you have this set up, you can communicate between your Erlang processes and PHP with something like this: http://www.math-hat.com/~zukerman/projects/php-erlang/
Then again, if you're still a newbie to Erlang, maybe you'll save time in the long run with Python and Twisted or Tornado.
Apache+php is indeed a bad technology for comet style applications. You can use a lot of other technologies that are closer to php though: Ruby, Python and Perl should all be usable. If you really want, you could probably write some kind of socket server in php aswell, but I would probably not bet on getting it to work out. That's not to say that Erlang isn't a good choice, but there are more mainstream alternatives.
If you don't want to use a mainstream language, be sure also to check out node.js, which runs some very impressive benchmarks. Plus you may already know a bit of javascript.
You can learn Erlang pretty quickly, you should be able to use things like gen_server, gen_event and that sort of thing from OTP. The quickest way to learn Erlang should be to work your way through the documentation and examples at: http://www.erlang.org/doc/index.html.
For the communication between PHP and Erlang you can use sockets, fsockopen() and the rest on the PHP side and gen_tcp on the Erlang side. You can parse the Erlang terms sent trough the pipe from the PHP side (more info here).
I never used Erlang and PHP but I used Erlang and Python with some success, knowing PHP it should be pretty easy, just try to keep everything clean and keep the state on the Erlang side, using PHP only to generate the UI.
If you are considering Python and Twisted you can take a look at Orbited. They have very mature Comet implementation. You can make Orbited to communicate with your PHP application through STOMP protocol.
This article has a decent tutorial which will get you started with Orbited
http://thingsilearned.com/2009/06/09/starting-out-with-comet-orbited-part-1/
To integrate your application with PHP you will need to google for PHP STOMP clients
An addtional option is to use Nginx and it's push module (http://pushmodule.slact.net/)
This will allow you to use Comet from PHP without the need to learn a new language.
You should look into Yaws. It's an Erlang web server that's been around for over a decade, is extremely stable and still under active development and maintenance, and supports long-polling, PHP applications, WebSockets, and much much more — pretty much everything you could want.
The Yaws sources are on github and its mailing list is here.
Try Chicago Boss framework here ... using that you don't have to know the nuts and bolts of the thing called OTP (which actually very easy, powerful and battle proved), because the designer of Chicago Boss, managed to encapsulate it nicely... according to the tutorial.
I'm learning it right now, after learning OTP.
Being as stubborn as it gets, I'm building my own PHP-based CMS and framework (named RAmen/FSM just for the kicks) that has been deployed multiple times for my customers. Now, I'm going to develop a support ticket application for it that I will deploy on a 'central' server for convenience of maintenance.
Now, I've looked into SOAP services and was happy until I got to WSDL generation in PHP and in itself. So, what would you suggest for me to 'securely' (as in, no https) manage this with SOAP-like simplicity on the client side ($support->newTicket), without the WSDL headaches on the server side? Or should I –gasp– stop being so stubborn and just go with a PHP library (in which case, please do recommend!)
Thank you, fellow pastafarians/spagnostic coders!
PHP has a native SOAP extension, that automates client as well as server. It is a little buggy in some places, but still better than nusoap (IMHO).
That said, I would never chose SOAP if I had any bearing on the decision. Use xml-rpc or a rest-based approach.
I have a similar question, whether to use REST or SOAP. I am using REST but that is beacuse i want a simple API like function not so much the rigid functionality associated with REST.
That being said here is a nice little library to get you started on SOAP
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/
By the sounds of it SOAP is actually what you want. you will fin it a bit easier to implement as you get the domain models from the WSDL.
What is the best method for communication between Flex and PHP?
In the past, we used AMFPHP with AS2, and it worked great for the most part (advantage of AMFPHP is that it also has a JSON mode that can let you seamlessly use the same remote PHP with either Javascript or Actionscript frontends).
However, it seems like AMFPHP isn't realy maintained anymore. So what do people recommend to replace it? So far, what I've found is:
Zend_AMF (looks too complex for us, we're not using the Zend framework otherwise)
AMFPHP (there were some updated made to support Flex, and it seems fairly stable, but not sure on long-term support)
XML (AS3 has nice XML handling routines, but it's more of a pain on the PHP side)
WebORB (I have no experience with this)
Roll-our-own using JSON or some other data-to-text serialization system (php's serialize(), XML, etc etc)
Mostly I'm leaning towards AMFPHP, even because of the downsides, since that's what I'm used to. Any reason I should consider switching to something else?
If you want to have fast and efficient communication, I highly recommend sticking with an AMF protocol instead of a REST or JSON custom format.
ZendAMF is actually not very confusing. Watch the introduction tutorial on GotoAndLearn, it's quite simple.
And just so you know, some of the developers from AMFPHP moved to work on ZendAMF. So in a sense, ZendAMF is the continuation of AMFPHP.
ZendAMF
Good short read - http://theflashblog.com/?p=441
For me this is no brainer. The Zend framework is one of the best php frameworks out there, and now you can talk to Flash clients. Top it off with Adobe support, that's a done deal in my book.
Alternatives :
WebORB for php
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-php
AMFPHP
http://www.amfphp.com
If you read the url above, you'll probably know why this is no longer on my radar.
I can't tell you what's best (because that's probably somewhat subjective anyway), but what I can do is tell you about a recent project of mine.
Since this was a very rich web app, and data requests to the server would be frequent, I wanted to make sure the size of the requests were as small as possible. This mean choosing JSON as the format.
Next, becuase of the nature of the application and the fact that my flash/flex developers were 1000 miles away, I needed an API that was simple and stateless. This ultimately led us to HTTP + REST.
So, the communication layer of my app is a simple Zend Framework powered set of REST resources with URIs like
user/10
review/15
location/8/reviews
They all return JSON. There's a common JSON format for all errors, as well (exceptions are trapped and converted into JSON objects) so that the flash client can easily handle failure.
If you're not using a framework like Zend, regular ol AMFPHP is still great, if for no other reason than that it's simple. I think if you feel comfortable with it, why not go for it? The thing about the role of these AMF interfaces is that they really don't need to do too much, and what AMFPHP does have in class mapping, recordset parsing into ArrayCollection, great performance.... it even does well with XML, since it gets compressed. The service browser combined with Charles has covered me as well.
I haven't been able to make much sense of how the ZendAMF effort relates to the original AMFPHP. While I can dig, I'm just saying that in following the AMFPHP mailing list on Nabble, reading Wade Arnold's blog... it's just not entirely clear.
You should consider using Zend AMF. The Zend Framework is designed to be a pick and chose framework so it is completely OK to pick a single component (in this case Zend AMF) for your application.
Zend AMF is extremely easy to use. All you have to do is specify the functions/classes you want to expose and specify class mapping to your action-script classes. Everything else is pretty much transparent.
This link is a screencast showing how to use WebORB for PHP WDMF (WebORB Data Management for Flex).
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-php/developer-den/screencasts/weborb-data-management-for-flex-and-php.html
In all projects involving Flash and PHP backend, I worked with either AMFPHP or XML requests.
AMFPHP really simplifies understanting the application for future maintenance, although it ties the whole thing to that specific technology and involves some additional overhead on the server side - to create all needed classes.
As per XML, well, what you gain here are standard REST webservices and it doesn't depend on Flash (you could pull data from a desktop app as well, for example, whereas using JSON or any other technology dependent on browsers don't allow for that).
If you want 100% future "support", then I'd recommend what doesn't need any support at all: XML.
XML on PHP can be a lot simpler with SimpleXML.
I'd just use JSON as your returns for simple calls against your PHP api.
I would definitely go for WebORB. I used it with .NET in a previous job I had and it was a joy to code with. Its ease of use and its well thought management console make it very fast to learn, and its documentation is very complete; I know it's tempting to stay with AMF just because it's what you already know, but I believe it's worth to give WebORB a try.
Take a look at this screencast for Actionscript generation with PHP, it's quite fancy.
Cheers.
PHP has a pretty good serialize() function, so for a recent project I did (high scores for a game), I used Sephiroth's Serializer. It makes the serialization on Flash's side nearly as easy as it is in PHP. Serializer also deals with datatypes (unlike json/xml) like AMF.
Downside--it's not as compact as AMF, but that's nothing gzip compression can't handle.
AMF has a pretty situational advantage. If you're looking to transfer large and complex Object, by all means go with AMF. But little does people know about the overhead that AMF carries when you're transferring small objects. If you're only transferring an object with 3 properties, using AMF can triple your payload size.
On a side note, I'm a big advocate of RESTful architecture. Since JSON and AMF are both just representations, you can build a REST service that accepts both, and negotiate the actual representation with your client at runtime.
"If you want to have fast and efficient communication, I highly recommend sticking with an AMF protocol"
And if you want a fast, efficient, and generalized communication, go with json. Then your web service will be available to flash, ajax, or regular http requests.