replacing socket.io with telepat for real time updates - websocket

How does telepat-io differ from socket-io and other socket based real time sytems ? what is the underlying technology - is it a wrapper on top of socket-io ?

Reading through their website, you can see references to socket.io...
Reading through their code, for example, their client code, you can also find references to socket.io...
It seems to me that the word wrapper doesn't fit, as they focus on creating an optimized design for meshing different technologies to create a real-time application backend... I would go with the word framework if I had to put a name on it. If you like their approach, you'll probably enjoy simplified scaling as this is one of their main concerns.

As Myst pointed out, Telepat is more of a framework, a full stack software. This framework uses socket.io for the notification part of the system: clients manipulate application resources -> API -> workers -> subscribed clients get notified of the changes through various means (Apple Push Notifications, Google Cloud Messaging and web sockets for any other client).
So in short: Telepat uses socket.io for client notifications.

Related

Nativescript mapserver maps

Any ideas how to start with MapServer with NativeScript. I don't have necessary skills yet to make own plugin but I must try if nothing else is found.
Does anyone know any resources to get started implementing mapserver maps for nativescript. Plugin, code anything.
I assume you have an application using NativeScript framework and you want to include some map services from MapServer.
If that is the case, you may not need to write your own plugin but you still do some level of coding to achieve the goal.
My recommendation would be :
1) At your front end, choose a GIS map library such as Google maps API, Leaflet or OpenLayers API. The GIS library would handle a lot of critical tasks in the process such as handling communication with GIS server, user interface function etc. So that you don't have to reinvent the wheels again.
https://developers.google.com/maps/
2) Based on your system requirement, you may or may not need a GIS server such as MapServer. Data could come from directly from clients for example. But since you mentioned it i would think you may need a GIS server to publish some data for the application to consume the services.
MapServer services via OGC standard protocols are easy to integred with most of the popular GIS libraries mentioned earlier. So once you publish Map service (wms) for example, it would be as easy as add one layer in such GIS library point to the service endpoint you published via Http request and by passing some parameters you would be able to get the GIS contents.
This is the link about how to consume MapServer service on the client side:
http://mapserver.org/ogc/wms_client.html

Ways of communications between Chromium container and VB application

We have a traditional VB application which are used for Organization operations. Now we are building a Hybrid application developed by using HTML5,CSS and Javascript which is targeted on Google Chromium desktop container. Now we are planning to provide a way to exchange large data like employees records between both of these 2 applications. Now my specific question is
What are the different ways to achieve communication between Chromium desktop container and VB application to exchange large chunks of data?
Sounds a bit painful no matter what.
Chrome Apps Architecture
All external processes are isolated from the app.
This would seem to suggest the obvious course is to use cloud data services, whether on public or private clouds.
I suspect that for political as well as practical reasons no cloud vendor goes to the trouble to provide VB/VBA-friendly APIs for their services. Mainly nobody wants to deal with support issues from the teeming hordes of casual coders the VB community is saddled with.
The VB6 community hasn't stepped up and taken care of this themselves either.
If you can limp along with the burdens of ".Net Inter Clop" (the usual MS answer) that might be a way to exploit existing API implementations.
Otherwise you might roll your own cloud. I see a few obvious services you'd want to implement in your cloud with lightweight APIs easily implemented in both of your development ecosystems:
Bulk Storage. I suggest WebDAV, which IIS supports. If you eschew the locking features then WebDAV API implementations are pretty easy in both JS and VB. Or buy (or scrounge open source) implementations of a more complete WebDAV client library.
DBMS. Pick any, implement a simple REST-like XML over HTTP API. Relatively easy to implement.
Push Notifications. I'd write a custom service accepting long-duration TCP connections from all clients, and with protocols and workflow à la Amazon SNS or Google Cloud Messaging. Such a service would be generally light in resource consumption but you'd probably want a dedicated box with OS tweaks to support a large number of active TCP connections.
Maybe optionally a message queue service?
Nothing novel here, these are all well established patterns.
All of the tools to do that are pretty off-the-shelf whether you want your cloud servers to be based on Windows, Linux, or generically Java anywhere.
Most of the effort will probably go into developing a consistent authentication model, access control model, and of course an integrated administration interface, monitoring, and logging to help keep operating overhead low and uptime high. Well, that and developer docs and training.
Ok, still a lot of work. Too bad there isn't a "cloud in the box" with the API libraries you'd need that you can buy off the shelf today.
Or perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

Phalcon php vs node.js

We are going to develop rest server for our application (and all logic is on client javascript).
So we thought to use Phalcon php, but we also need to create realtime chat system, which is much more easy to do using node.js. This made us think about using node.js instead of phalcon
Unfortunatly, we are not good expirienced in node.js, we love phalcon for its performance and internal beauty.
The quiestion is, did anybody compare phalcon and node.js performance? May be it's better to use node.js only for long polling chat requests, but i dont like when project is connected with so different tools.
You are trying to compare two different things IMO.
node.js has a lot of power and flexibility but so does Phalcon. If you want to create a chat application with Phalcon, then you will need to implement some sort of polling mechanism in your browser that would refresh the chat window every X seconds. Getting/Inserting the data from the database will be Phalcon's job. Javascript will be used to do the polling i.e. refresh the chat page every X seconds.
The problem with this approach is that you might be hitting your web server every X seconds from every client that has the chat application open - and thus refreshing the chat contents, even when there are no messages. This can become very intensive very quickly.
node.js has the ability to send messages to the subscribed clients instantly. Web sockets can do the same thing I believe.
Check this video out, which will give you an idea of how this can be achieved easily:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW1vsKMUaKg
The idea is to use technologies that will not burden your hardware, rather collaborate with it. Having a "subscription" notification system (such as sockets or node.js) reduces the load on your application since only the subscribed clients receive the new messages and no full refresh is needed from the chat clients.
Phalcon is great for the back end with its speed and it can be used to construct the message which in turn will be passed to the transport layer and sent to the client. Depending on how you want to implement this, there are plenty of options around and you can easily mix and match technologies :)
as #Nikolaos Dimopoulos said, you're trying to compare two different things.
But here is my advice, while you're experienced with PhalconPHP framework, and you want to benefit from Phalcon speed and performance, you can implement the web app in Phalcon FW, and the chatting system in Node.JS as a service.
If your web application "The Phalcon app" needs to push messages from the backend, you can use http://elephant.io/ library for that, I have done this before with Yii framework and Node, and it's working perfectly.
My advice is to use what you already know, experimenting with nodejs just for the chat application.
Mainly because you said you do not have experience with it, so, because the chat app is something a lot of people made you'll find plenty of examples.
By doing so you will learn a lot from node and might even think about migrating from Phalcon if it suits your needs, using the features offered by expressjs for example.
I would not choose one over the other based on performance.

How to structure a client-server application with 'push' notifications

EDIT: I forgot to include the prime candidate for web applications: JSON over HTTP/REST + Comet. It combines the best features of the others (below)
Persevere basically bundles everything I need in a server
The focus for Java and such is definitely on Comet servers, but it can't be too hard to use/write a client.
I'm embarking on an application with a server holding data, and clients executing operations which would affect this data, and thus require some sort of notification across all interested/subscribed clients.
The first client will probably be written in WPF, but we'll probably need to add clients written in other languages, e.g. a Java (Swing?) client, and possibly, a web client.
The actual question(s): What protocol should I use to implement this? How easy would it be to integrate with JS, Java and .NET (precisely, C#) clients?
I could use several interfaces/protocols, but it'd be easier overall to use one that is interoperable. Given that interoperability is important, I have researched a few options:
JSON-RPC
lightweight
supports notifications
The only .NET lib I could find, Jayrock doesn't support notifications
works well with JS
also true of XML-based stuff (and possibly, even binary protocols) BUT this would probably be more efficient, thanks to native support
Protobuf/Thrift
IDL makes it easy to spit out model classes in each language
doesn't seem to support notifications
Thrift comes with RPC out of the box, but protobufs don't
not sure about JS
XML-RPC
simple enough, but doesn't support notifications
SOAP: I'm not even sure about this one; I haven't grokked this yet.
seems rather complex
Message Queues/PubSub approach: Not strictly a protocol, but might be fitting
I hardly know anything about them, and got lost amongst the buzzwords`-- JMS? **MQ?
Perhaps combined with some RPC mechanism above, although that might not be strictly necessary, and possibly, overkill.
Other options are, of course, welcome.
I am partial to the pub/sub design you've suggested. I'd take a look at ZeroMQ. It has bindings to C#, Java, and many other platforms.
Bindings list: http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:clr
I also found this conversation on the ZeroMQ dev listing that may answer some questions you have about multiple clients and ZeroMQ: http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2010-February/002146.html
As XMPP was mentioned, SIP has a similar functionality. This might be more accessible for you.
We use Servoy for this. It does automatic data broadcasting to web-clients and java-clients. I'm not sure if broadcasts can be sent to other platforms, you might be able to find an answer to that on their forum.
If you want to easily publish events to clients across networks, you may wish to look at a the XMPP standard. (Used by, amongst other things, Jabber and Google Talk.)
See the extension for publish-subscribe functionality.
There are a number of libraries in different languages including C#, Java and Javascript.
You can use SOAP over HTTP to modify the data on the server and SOAP over SMTP to notify the subscribed clients.
OR
The server doesn't know anything about the subscription and the clients call the server by timeout to track updates they are interested in, using XML-RPC, SOAP (generated using WSDL), or simply HTTP GET if there is no need to pass back complex data on tracking.

Is there some way to PUSH data from web server to browser?

Of course I am aware of Ajax, but the problem with Ajax is that the browser should poll the server frequently to find whether there is new data. This increases server load.
Is there any better method (even using Ajax) other than polling the server frequently?
Yes, what you're looking for is COMET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming). Other good Google terms to search for are AJAX-push and reverse-ajax.
Yes, it's called Reverse Ajax or Comet. Comet is basically an umbrella term for different ways of opening long-lived HTTP requests in order to push data in real-time to a web browser. I'd recommend StreamHub Push Server, they have some cool demos and it's much easier to get started with than any of the other servers. Check out the Getting Started with Comet and StreamHub Tutorial for a quick intro. You can use the Community Edition which is available to download for free but is limited to 20 concurrent users. The commercial version is well worth it for the support alone plus you get SSL and Desktop .NET & Java client adapters. Help is available via the Google Group, there's a good bunch of tutorials on the net and there's a GWT Comet adapter too.
Nowadays you should use WebSockets.
This is 2011 standard that allows to initiate connections with HTTP and then upgrade them to two-directional client-server message-based communication.
You can easily initiate the connection from javascript:
var ws = new WebSocket("ws://your.domain.com/somePathIfYouNeed?args=any");
ws.onmessage = function (evt)
{
var message = evt.data;
//decode message (with JSON or something) and do the needed
};
The sever-side handling depend on your tenchnology stack.
Look into Comet (a spoof on the fact that Ajax is a cleaning agent and so is Comet) which is basically "reverse Ajax." Be aware that this requires a long-lived server connection for each user to receive notifications so be aware of the performance implications when writing your app.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)
Comet is definitely what you want. Depending on your language/framework requirements, there are different server libraries available. For example, WebSync is an IIS-integrated comet server for ASP.NET/C#/IIS developers, and there are a bunch of other standalone servers as well if you need tighter integration with other languages.
I would strongly suggest to invest some time on Comet, but I dont know an actual implementation or library you could use.
For an sort of "callcenter control panel" of a web app that involved updating agent and call-queue status for a live Callcenter we developed an in-house solution that works, but is far away from a library you could use.
What we did was to implement a small service on the server that talks to the phone-system, waits for new events and maintains a photograph of the situation. This service provides a small webserver.
Our web-clients connects over HTTP to this webserver and ask for the last photo (coded in XML), displays it and then goes again, asking for the new photo. The webserver at this point can:
Return the new photo, if there is one
Block the client for some seconds (30 in our setup) waiting for some event to ocurr and change the photograph. If no event was generated at that point, it returns the same photo, only to allow the connection to stay alive and not timeout the client.
This way, when clients polls, it get a response in 0 to 30 seconds max. If a new event was already generated it gets it immediately), otherwise it blocks until new event is generated.
It's basically polling, but it somewhat smart polling to not overheat the webserver. If Comet is not your answer, I'm sure this could be implemented using the same idea but using more extensively AJAX or coding in JSON for better results. This was designed pre-AJAX era, so there are lots of room for improvement.
If someone can provide a actual lightweight implementation of this, great!
An interesting alternative to Comet is to use sockets in Flash.
Yet another, standard, way is SSE (Server-Sent Events, also known as EventSource, after the JavaScript object).
Comet was actually coined by Alex Russell from Dojo Toolkit ( http://www.dojotoolkit.org ). Here is a link to more infomration http://cometdproject.dojotoolkit.org/
There are other methods. Not sure if they are "better" in your situation. You could have a Java applet that connects to the server on page load and waits for stuff to be sent by the server. It would be a quite a bit slower on start-up, but would allow the browser to receive data from the server on an infrequent basis, without polling.
You can use a Flash/Flex application on the client with BlazeDS or LiveCycle on the server side. Data can be pushed to the client using an RTMP connection. Be aware that RTMP uses a non standard port. But you can easily fall back to polling if the port is blocked.
It's possible to achive what you're aiming at through the use of persistent http connections.
Check out the Comet article over at wikipedia, that's a good place to start.
You're not providing much info but if you're looking at building some kind of event-driven site (a'la digg spy) or something along the lines of that you'll probably be looking at implementing a hidden IFRAME that connects to a url where the connection never closes and then you'll push script-tags from the server to the client in order to perform the updates.
Might be worth checking out Meteor Server which is a web server designed for COMET. Nice demo and it also is used by twitterfall.
Once a connection is opened to the server it can be kept open and the server can Push content a long while ago I did with using multipart/x-mixed-replace but this didn't work in IE.
I think you can do clever stuff with polling that makes it work more like push by not sending content unchanged headers but leaving the connection open but I've never done this.
You could try out our Comet Component - though it's extremely experimental...!
please check this library https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR to know how to push data to clients dynamically as it becomes available
You can also look into Java Pushlets if you are using jsp pages.
Might want to look at ReverseHTTP also.

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