I will be developing an application for a club where they will have visitors use biometric systems(finger print) or magnetic cards to mark their attendance.
This application is planned as a web app, made using PHP/MySQL/Javascript. It does a lot of other things as well.
What I wanted to find out is how is the interface between Biometric/Megnetic Card systems to a web app done?
I've never worked on this and am hoping if someone who has experience with this can throw some light on this as to how this could be accomplished. Any pointers will be appreciated.
Also, we will be hosting this application remotely. So we won't have physical access to the web-server.
(I'm afraid there's got to be some form of application installed on a pc that would interface with the hardware and probably makes calls to the web app. But, if there was a way to connect it to the web app directly, then the app would be easy to deploy to any location with minimal installation.)
Thanks! :)
How is the hardware connected? Directly to the app server, or to a standalone box of some sort? If it's a standalone box, then yes you'll have to have some kind of program on the box collect the data and send it to the web app. If it's connected directly to the app server, then you need to write something that either polls the hardware or receives messages/events from the driver and DTRT wrt the web app.
There three type of communication channels are supported by the biometric machines. They are serial, TCP/IP and HTTP. In your case, you either need to implement TCP/IP or HTTP.
If your application is running the intranet, then you can implement the TCP/IP server application and host at a intranet system which is expected to write in a common database between the biometric application and your web-app.
If your application is hosted at the server, then you can implement the http server and associated the URL with the machine. For this you need buy the http api supported machines. Here is the google search link for finding such machines.
Related
I recently built a web application for my company, but the client needed the application to work both offline and online, depending on the availability of internet connection.
Anyways, I'm looking for a way to allow my application to run offline and online. The following technologies are used: PHP, MySQL, jQuery, HTML, and CSS.
Clients could be using that app without internet connection; if there is internet connection the app will automatically move to using the hosting server.
This is either trivial or insanely difficult, depending on a few things:
Does your client have an internal network it can use?
Can that internal network be accessed from the outside?
How many users will your application have?
Are they all on the same network?
On the trivial end of the scale, you can host the entire application locally on your client's network, that can also be accessed from outside, if there is an internet connection. But if there isn't as long as you're on the internal network, the service continues.
On the insanely difficult end, you can build your service so that each browser stores enough information on the machine to allow the user to continue to use the service even if internet connection drops. And then when the connection resumes, the service syncs any updates to the browser.
But this all depends on the answers to those questions.
I have developed an android app with the back end server in php using phpadmin.Now i want to export tables and the scripts to the server. I have following questions
Should i choose a cloud server like amazon ec2 or rack space or host ? I hosted a website previously , would it be the same way ?
I am using google api,GCM in my app, would they work without any issues ?
Please help in clarifying my questions
Im developing an app in html5 for android and ios and im going to host it in cloud, probably with amazon.
With cloud you will pay what you really use. With traditional hosting you pay a fixed amount a year/month regardless your app is being used or not.
Cloud is dynamic, so if suddenly your app becomes populuar your app will still work fine because the cloud provider will give more resources.
Ill try amazon because its free under a certain amount of resources demand.
For the second question i think there are no problems with these apis.
Android apps like
Connectbot
Overlook Whiz
Magic Color Picker skyvi
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I'm working on a project that is located on 2 domains within same server:
1. DataSource system, which provides data for main app
2. Main app, providing the data for front-end app.
App 1 needs to work on seperate domain, as it's data source for more applications. I'm trying to find some way to boost communication performance. Simple call from app 2 to app 1 takes approximately 0.3-0.4s.
Is there anyway to force server to bypass TCP/IP communication and call service directly from localhost?
Both applications are written in PHP with Zend Framework. The server is IIS. Both applications are based on SOAP solutions.
Would appreciate any tips. Will provide additional information if needed.
Thank you in advance for any help.
You have a misunderstanding here. If you call services from localhost (i.e. via Zend_HTTP_Client), this means you are using the tcp/ip and http layers here. Everything works via sockets, no matter if localhost or external ip address.
If the other application needs to be accessible "from the outside" (no integration possible) you can imho only speed up by using a faster webserver (e.g. nginx), turning off modules in your webserver that you don't need or writing your own socket server, dismissing a whole lot of the processing apache and nginx do. http://devzone.zend.com/209/writing-socket-servers-in-php may help you with your first steps.
I want to control a robot from the web, the robot is connected to Android device. The operation will be as the following :
a web application written using JavaScript and HTML runs on desktop computer which takes the keyboard input from the user and send them to the android device connected to the robot.
the android device receive the commands and then send them to Arduino board which used to control the robot.
But how should I deliver the data to the Android device which doesn't has a static IP address?
I have two approaches to solve that :
the JavaScript application sends the keyboard input to a web server runs PHP and MySQL , then the php application store the data on the MySQL database. An application runs on Android connected to that web server and extract the data from the MySQL database.
the JavaScript sends the data to the web server. The android application connected to the web server receives the data directly so the web server is just used as a relay.
The first approach is easy to do but its slow , so my question is...
How to implement the second approach and which web technologies should I use to implement it? And how to make the web server works as relay between two sides?
PS : I am planning to use 000webhost.com as web server. so I will not use my own server
You can either have your Android application poll the webserver for outstanding commands. This is a little inefficient in terms of data usage, but if you're on an unlimited 3G plan / wi-fi, you could live with it. It will be very easy to implement.
Alternatively, set up a TCP server on your server, and have your Android application open a socket connection with the server. This way, your web application can send commands to the server which will immediately stream them to the Android device. It will be slightly harder to implement, but will be more efficient and robust if done right.
PS - Most shared servers don't allow you to open a TCP server on your host so you might be forced to go with the first option.
PPS - I wasn't aware of Google Cloud Messaging. It seems to be a good solution for you what you're attempting to achieve. You should have a look into it.
Normally, I would use a PHP webservice to do this, but since the front-end is hosted on a linux box, I need another way to do this (so I don't have to go through the trouble of installing FreeTDS, etc. I will if I have to).
Is there a better way to do this? I'm not a web guy, but I'm trying my best.
If the web host is a linux box then you will have to write a web service as a go between for Silverlight and SQL Server. If you have an ASP.NET capable web host available you can host the Silverlight in a RIA Services project, which gives you more direct access (still not actually direct, but you treat it very similarly).
Not really - especialyl given that for security reasons silverlight apps should only connect back to the host they were loaded from (otherwise a silverlight app could be abused as network scanner etc.).