I want to make a Firefox extension that can store and retrieve data from a database. However I've only been finding solutions that would work locally for each user. I'd like every user to have access to the same database.
Is that possible?
It is possible to access remote SQL databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL with node.js modules, but it is more sensible to create REST API front ends to your databases and call them from the extension. Exposing the SQL calls directly in your web extension is not a good idea. It is basically bad security practice and will expose your database to hackers.
You will also need your addon to pass Mozilla's approval process if you are going to distribute publicly and I doubt the reviewers will be pleased to see raw SQL calls in your extension's code.
The more sensible way is to update the database is through a REST API front end.
A simple example on how to create a REST API for a Postgres database can be found at Node.js, Express.js, and PostgreSQL: CRUD REST API example - LogRocket Blog and this playlist show how to create a REST interface in a Firefox extension - Build a Firefox Extension from Scratch that integrates with Node.js - DEV Community
The above database example is quite simple. For real world use you will need a more advanced REST framework for your API which sanitizes the data before inserting it into the databasse. You have more reading to do here.
However if you need to make SQL calls directly from your extension which I still don't advise, you can include some packages from node.js in your web extension, and use browserify which extracts and packages the modules needed into your extension. Your addons though had better be for private or in-house use, not for public distribution.
Some nodejs modules for database access are - https://github.com/mysqljs/mysql, https://node-postgres.com/ and https://www.npmjs.com/package/pg.
Just a little advice. Feel free to ignore it if you have nothing to do with it. Your question sounds quiet generic. You should learn and doing it by yourself first and only ask here when there are specific issues you're stuck with.
By "locally", I think you mean via Web SQL or IndexedDB. They're called local database and their behaviors are totally different from what you're looking for.
I should haven't need to tell you to do this. Just in case. Of course first thing first you need to know how website is working for both front end and back end, not just local stuff, especially how they're communicating between each other. So you should know about HTTP request, Javascript, and AJAX.
What has it to do with Firefox extension?. Not just Firefox, browser extension is just another type of web page that overlaying the opened web page in all kind of browser. In Firefox the opened page is called activeTabs. The only difference from regular web page is you need to signup your account first, manifest.json file as your project root file, and it compile from command line with web-ext tools. In case if you're facing Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) restriction, follow instructions HERE and allow the URL on server side.
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I'm trying to integrate backend code into a Wix site. Im not too picky about how I want to do this, or what language to write in (ideally, I have a locally-hosted Java code that I'd love to simply call). I wouldn't mind re-writing it in JavaScript though, or another language. But before I decide that I'm confused about my options. I can code but I'm new to the concepts like modules, APIs, & servers.
According to my research, back-end code with Wix is supposed to be easy (or at least do-able and not THAT complicated)....
From this webpage https://support.wix.com/en/article/corvid-calling-server-side-code-from-the-front-end-with-web-modules,
"Web modules are exclusive to Corvid and enable you to write functions that run server-side in the backend, and easily call them in your client-side code. With web modules you can import functions from backend into files or scripts in public, knowing they will run server-side. Corvid handles all the client-server communication required to enable this access."
And from this: https://www.sitepoint.com/what-is-wix-code/
"It’s serverless: All this added functionality comes in a serverless environment that lets you get your work done without any of the normal full-stack development headaches.
Just code and go: Wix Code has a built-in, online IDE and backend so you can just add the code you need to your page or your site, publish, and you’re live."
So, I thought they have a backend IDE where I can write backend code directly, or I could call my Java program. But, as I tried doing this and finding tutorials, it seems I can really only do this by calling a public API from the backend...?
https://youtu.be/tuu0D1izrUU
But ive also read (and someone who supposedly has done it before told me this) that Wix integrates with node.js, which is a backend version of JavaScript.
Can I use a Wix domain for a NodeJS app?
But, when I go into my Wix site I cannot find any option for using Node JS, and doing research on that gives me no useful results.
So, I'm thoroughly confused on what the capabilities are here. Can someone help me make sense of this?
Why are there no tutorials showing explicit code in the Corvid backend module? What's stopping me from simply writing my Java program there in a module? Do I really need an API endpoint to call and pass to the front end?
Is Node JS supported or not - has anyone done this before?
Also, in one link above they said everything is "serverless". But if I have to set up my own API endpoint won't I need to set up my own server??
There are basically two ways to go about this, which you seem to have already discovered.
Write your backend code in your Wix site. Indeed, the backend is built on Node.js as you can see here. Using this approach you will have to use JavaScript. As you seem to have found, you write this code in the Backend section of your site in a Web Module. Pros: you don't need to worry about managing a server and all your code is in one place.
Expose your already existing Java code as an API that your Wix site can call using the wix-fetch API. Pros: you don't need to rewrite your code.
I created a new .NET based web application named shabang using the web client and it displays the default woohoo-page when I browse to shabang.azurewebsites.net. Then, I discovered that there's a console in the web client and when I use it, I can see a directory structure including my login name, home directory etc. However, I can't find the files being served and, since I can see a web page being rendered when browsing, I'm certain they are there, somewhere.
Where is the (or equivalent of) wwwroot?
I've googled it but it's a bit hard to word what I'm asking in a way that Google will understand. Just a bunch of guides that are way too advanced to distill the information from.
By default, it is d:\home\site\wwwroot. It can also be modified using the Azure Portal.
Note that you should use the Kudu Console to see it. e.g. https://shabang.scm.azurewebsites.net
I would like to build a chrome extension (CE) that pulls data from a ruby db for a specific user. So, in a basic example, if an user submits their favorite color as 'red' and sport as 'tennis' into the db from the core website, when they click the CE, 'red' and 'tennis' will show up no matter where they are on the internet.
Any guidance on how to build something like this? Seems quite simple but am not sure how the CE files fit in with the ruby folder framework.
Also, is it possible to write to a ruby database from a popped out CE? i.e. - submitting 'red' and 'tennis' from the CE to the ruby database to go along with the previous example. Any guidance?
Cheers
This is a very general question so it sounds like you will need to learn a lot. Which can be a good thing :)
Here are the general steps you need:
Look into building an API for your ruby application. This will allow you to get data from your database. For example, you can
make an app where you go to http://yoursite.com/api/favorites and that will return a list of all favorites as JSON. Then in your Chrome Extension you can parse the JSON and display the results to the user. You will probably want to do this using an ajax call (see jquery.ajax for an easy way to use ajax).
Assuming you want user accounts, your user will need to be logged in. Then you can use your user's cookies to verify that they are logged in and show them custom info. i.e. going to http://yoursite.com/api/favorites will just show the favorites for that user, not for everyone.
Finally, submitting things to the database...you can have another route where users can send stuff. For example, if you go to http://yoursite.com/api/favorites/add?color=red then it will add the color red to that user's favorites. You will need to write all the logic for adding stuff to the database...again, it might help you to go through a rails tutorial and then look at building an API.
Related to #3, look into RESTful APIs. A good convention is that if you issue a GET request, you're asking for data, but if you issue a POST request, you are adding data (in your case, creating a new favorite).
Finally, for terminology: it's not a "ruby" database, it's just a database. You can access a database using almost any language, and it sounds like you are accessing it using ruby right now :)
If you only need to store data for one machine browsing anywhere online, chrome has a storage api that would work great.
If you do need a ruby server, I would recommend looking at sinatra.
I need to test links inside a web application. I have looked at a couple tools (Xenu, various browser plugins, link-checker(ruby)). Nothing quite fits my needs which I will detail below.
I need to get past a login form
test needs to be rerun for different types of users (multiple sets of login credentials)
would like to automate this under a ci server (Jenkins)
the ability to spider the site
Does anyone have any ideas? Bonus if I can use Ruby to do this!
What you are asking for is beyond most of the test tools once you throw in the ability to spider the site.
That final requirement pushes you into the realm of hand-coding something. Using the Mechanize gem you could do all those things, but, you get to code a lot of the navigation of the site.
Mechanize uses Nokogiri internally, so it's easy to grab all links in a page, which you could store in a database to be checked by a different thread, or some subsequent code. That said, writing a spider is not hard if you're the owner of the pages you're hitting, because you can be pretty brutal about accessing the server and let the code run at full speed without worrying about being banned for excessive bandwidth use.
I am a newbie to Addon-SDK. I am making an Addon in which I log some information meant for manually viewing later on. I came across the
Simple-Storage API but as far as I could figure out, it saves the information internally in some format which can only be accessed via function calls i.e. "ss.storage.variable_name".
I was wondering if this information is accessible somehow from windows directory structure i.e. maybe from some file in the profile directory.
And secondly, is there any way to access the SQlite Database, or any third
party API?
(I don't know why but the cfx test for this API gives me errors, so not able
to use this).
You can try with localStorage of HTML5 via Javascript: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_webstorage.asp
And then with Store: https://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Storage