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I'm hoping to create some sort of attendance register by using iBeacons device. I was wondering if it's possible to hook it up to some kind of database to store which devices have passed it?
From what I have found there isn't a lot of documentation about how to store information in the iBeacon device.
Feel free to link anything interesting and thanks in advance.
Yes, this is possible and it is a very common part of building beacon applications. The typical approach is to do the following:
Make a mobile app that:
Generates a unique device identifier on first run, for later passing to a server. Send this to the server via a web service call along with name, email, and any other info you want to collect to identify the user.
Detects beacons, passing the beacon identifier on first detection to a web service along with the device identifier from (1)
Optionally store the detections in a debice-local persistent data store, in case connectivity is notvavailable at the time of detection so records can be sent to the server later.
Make a server side app that:
Has a database that stores beacon detevtions tied to a mobile device identifier, along with a timestamp.
Has a database table that assigns meaningful location info to unique beacon identifiers.
Exposes a web service to record detection records sent by the mobile app.
Exposes a web service to register a new device identifier and tie it to user info like name, email, etc.
Add additional logic and perhaps web UI to show the results of specific devices being in beacon-specific places at specific times.
Building an app that does this can vary quite a bit depending on the specific use case. This is why it does not lend itself to cookie cutter solutions easily linked to on the internet.
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I'm using phoenix controllers to receive data via REST calls. So an iOS app could send the "events" for each user and based on the event, I need to calculate the score/points and send it back to the user. Calculation and sending back to the user can happen asynchronously. I'm using Firebase to communicate back to the user.
What is a good pattern to do calculation? Calculate could be bunch of database queries to determine the score of that event. Where should this calculation happen? Background workers, GenEvent, streams within user-specific GenServer (I have supervised GenServer per user).
I would look at Phoenix channels, tasks and GenServer.
Additionally, if you would like to manage a pool of GenServer workers to do the calculations and maybe send back the results for you, check out Conqueuer. I wrote this library and it is in use in production systems for my company. It is uses poolboy, which is probably the most pervasive pool management library in Erlang/Elixir.
Admittedly, I do not fully understand the requirements of your system, but it does not seem to me GenEvent has a place in your requirements. GenEvent is about distributing events to one or more consumers of events. So unless you have a graph of processes that need to subscribe to events being emitted from other parts of your system I do not see a role for it.
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I'd like to get peoples thoughts on a scenario I'm about to encounter.
I've been tasked with building a RESTful Web API Service that will be used by two client applications.
One client application will be a web application and the other client will be a mobile application.
They are two distinctly different applications that are targeting the same data-store. I imagine that a lot of the requests made by both client applications will be of shared interest.(They may want to receive slightly different messages back in terms of the model objects they request).
But ultimately there will be differences, and I don't want to expose parts of the service that are designed for an individual client app to all other clients.
I've been looking at Versioning with ASP.NET Web API, where i can create the same controllers multiple times and create custom constraints to controller selectors that switch out the controller depending on the version used in the URI.
Is this a good idea in my scenario, or should i really be building two API's, one for each specific client application?
First of all, if you want client A to access certain resources while client B shouldn't, you're going to implement authorization like OAuth2.
In the other hand, I doubt that the solution should be implementing 2 different APIs or overcomplicate the code of a single API to return the same response with some differences.
Furthermore, you can emit same DTO for both clients and map the generic DTO to a domain object or other DTO using AutoMapper in order to avoid the hassle to manually set properties from one object to the other.
Finally, you can also use an OData interface to your RESTful API to let the client decide which properties you want to return in your entities or perform other operations during the request and get just what you need in each case.
Conclusion/summary: you shouldn't adapt the REST API to your clients, but the clients should adapt themselves to how the API works. At the end of the day, you're returning JSON entities and you can map them to any class even if the structure is different using AutoMapper as I said in the first paragraph. You can even implement a custom serializer if needed. It will be less pain than duplicating the server code because some differences.
What would happen if you add a third client and says "I want also a different structure in returned entities", add even a fourth one! You're going to get crazy, aren't you?
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I want the service to automatically send data to the phone when a row on a particular table is updated, how do I do this?
Step 1)
Create an application on your phone that supports push notifications.
Step 2)
Create a webservice (inside Azure) that you send your notification token and uri to plus some type of message that contains the stuff you want to monitor. Store that subscription somewhere, azure tables comes to mind.
Step 3)
have a worker role monitor the Azure database and the azure table of subscriptions to send out updates to your phone.
Monitoring for changes can be done in a number of ways, Sync framework is one of them. But it might be easier to use a a service + queue to isolate access to Sql Azure and then automatically send the push message to the phone if needed.
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I've been looking at systems such as txtlocal, esendex and clickatell. I need to send out a very large number of messages and ideally would like to go in at a lower level then using systems like these. Does anyone know how these SMS gateways like I've listed work in terms of actually sending out the messages? Will they have agreements with different carriers and be sending them out programmatically? I've tried contacting some UK carriers directly but as of yet haven't had any success getting any information from them.
Aggregators typically work by talking directly with a mobile carrier's internal SMSC using IP/X.25/frame relay and using a protocol like SMPP/CIMD to request a message send.
They will have connections to multiple networks SMSC's so they can do least cost routing (i.e sending a message to a user on their home network being cheaper).
Here are some contact details for Orange/Voda.
That said, MXTelecom as mentioned by Phill offer a good gateway service, as do mBlox - both of whom have already done all the hard (and expensive) work for you.
Working with an aggregator is definitely worth the effort. They handle the legal contracts with the providers as well as with the auditing services. You can go directly to a provider (e.g. AT&T, etc.) and broker the deal yourself but generally speaking you'll only need that if you have very specific program/campaign needs. Coke, for example, brokered their own deal to get the four-digit shortcode for COKE (2653).
Keep in mind, when working with an aggregator like MXTelecom you'll be signing a contractual agreement with them (usually for 6 to 12 months) and it'll take between 8-12 weeks (in the US) to get your shortcode provisioned and setup. It's not the funnest process, IMHO.
Oh, and don't forget, they will audit your system to make sure it does what it says it will do in your campaign document.
It is also possible to create your own system (at least in the US) and use a long code. One of our original prototype systems was built with Kannel using a mobile phone tethered to an Ubuntu box. With an unlimited plan it was quite nice. Usage is related to your carrier contract so be mindful.
Per your question of how they work... They generally work via an API (HTTP or SMPP are most common). Depending on your in/out volume you may want to put a queue in between your application and the aggregators API.
First if you're going to do any bulk SMS messaging you should get a Short Code. An aggregator will have all the necessary API's/SDK and documentation for you.
Try MXTelecom (AKA OpenMarket)
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I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:
An application can use it as a call home mechanism
An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
An application can use it for heartbeat purposes
Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?
I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.
Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.
But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.
One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."
I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:
Twitter image encoding challenge
The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.
Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.
Check out his post
I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).
I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...
It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.
If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.
For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).
I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol.
For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.
Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.
They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.
Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...
http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq