I have run into a small problem. I have a site built that only has a web interface at the moment, but I want to expand and build a REST API for a mobile app. The problem is, my controllers return blade views, and not a JSON response. How would I go about writing the code for my API? It almost seems as if I will have to copy and paste code and then format it to return JSON, but that would create quite the headache for patching bugs. Any thoughts?
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I need to develop an application get html content from certain urls and shows them in my own web app.
UI web application will be laravel 5.3 its ok. But the thing is key pointhere that retrieves data from urls(read and parse html content of via url)
and writes it to postgresql db migth be developed within laravel also ?
Before I decide to create this post I feel had to make an web service in python and read url and writes to db and read them within laravel web application. Which one is better or more efficient?
Besides them I also wonder that is possible develop such a web service in laravel
You can use ixudra/curl package. It's powerful, easy to use and you will be free to do anything you want. You can also save results into database. Make sure php-curl module installed on your php before you use this package. there is a pacakge named Guzzle and you can use that package but it's a little bit complicated than ixudra.
when you get html content from requested urls. You can parse the content with yangqi/htmldom package.
im trying to create a Single Page Website with DurandalJS in the frontend and Laravel as the Backend. Do you think this is a good Idea?
If yes how would I do the following:
What would your recommendation for the basic interaction between both frameworks be?
Would you rather have all the computation done in JS instead of Laravel sending calculated and styled returns?
How Do I setup Laravels controller in order to only get dynamic Data for, say a Div, instead of a whole page?
How can I adjust the browser URLs?
I hope I was specific enough, thank You in advance.
Laravel does not actually care about what framework you use to build the Frontend. Laravel is just a framework that helps you build your application with. It gives you great advantage with respect to the time spent and effort.
You can use any frontend framework that you want to build your app with. I have actually not used Durandal, but from the first look of it here is my opinion.
Durandal is built on top of jQuery, knockoutJS and requireJS. It also has a MV* architecture in place with support for eventing as well. So you could basically define routes on Laravel and initiate the communication between both the frameworks through events and ajax. Again this completely depends on the functionality that you are building.
In the overall flow of your app, consider Laravel as a Model that just gives data from a source to your app and Durandal as your views and controllers. This way, it will keep your data flow cleaner and easier to build. Computation of your functionality depends on how important and secretive the app is. If there are functionalities/implementations that you need to be secretive about, you can keep it on Laravel and just send computed data to Durandal. If its a web app that you are building, then keeping all implementation on the JS is just a right click away from knowing what and how you have built it. One can just see how the implementation is done just looking at the Javascript source of the web app. If you are building Mobile Device App, then the case is different.
Take a look at Restful Controllers. Will give you an idea on how to setup controllers to return only data. But if you need to return the div itself, then you can make use of the Basic Controllers of Laravel to perform them.
You can setup cleaner routes for the browser URL's. Take a look at Laravel Routing
I have a client with a content-heavy site built in CMS Made Simple. The redesign requires a mostly AJAX interface, and I think a frontend framework like Backbone or Angular would be the way to go.
I want to avoid moving off CMS Made Simple, though (client is used to that interface, it will be annoying to migrate all the data).
I think if I could find or create a RESTful api for CMS Made Simple, I'd solve my problem. But after searching around online, I only found CGSocialApp module, which seems to provide a limited API for things like user management. I've also looked into other AJAX solutions for CMS Made Simple, and there don't seem to be good modules for it.
If there is no ready-made solution for me, how complex would building a RESTful API module be? I haven't built a RESTFUL api in a PHP framework before.
Thanks for any guidance!
So, there is no easy answer for this question, as the CMSMS doesn't have a build-in RESTful API.
I would go for one of the two solutions:
1. Output the content as hand made json.
In CMSMS, you really have a lot of control on the templates. You could change the default templates to output json content instead of HTML content. The only issue is that the CMSMS will still send an http content-type header, that you can try to ignore in the JS part.
To access the menu, just remove it from the main template and create an empty page who output the {menu}with a custom template that also build json content.
That's the quick and dirty solution, but it should be very accessible in terms of doing it.
2. Create a dedicated module.
As far as I know, there are no modules that expose the CMSMS in RESTFul format, but a module is really very easy to build. Well, you can try to build it yourself, with the help of the community. It don't really solve the current problem, but it's a hint.
I hope it shed some light on the problem.
Doing anything in the terminal, git, etc multiplies my learning curve in attempting to quickly develop an app using CodeIgniter. I realize the need for a Javascript framework and would like to use AngularJS - is there any way around the terminal?
All you need to do is to download the AngularJS source files (.js files) and get coding. I am new to it too and am fairly impressed with it. However it seems to me that is is designed for different things than CodeIgniter.
Angular JS basically moves your MVC from the back end to the front end, my limited experience tells me that it is for simpler apps than what CodeIgniter would be for. You can certainly still have some logic in your MVC back end, but the idea is that Angular becomes the application and you use a back end primarily for data storage.
There may be a way to mix the two together by making limited scope Angular pages that are worked within a superstructure of the CodeIgniter MVC, but I have not figured this out yet.
AngularJS can certainly work with Code Igniter, and you don't need to use the terminal for either.
You're probably going to want to write a RESTful API with Code Igniter that AngularJS can communicate with. Check out this article for RESTful services with CI: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2/
(a little old, but the basic concept is the same)
Then, with AngularJS, you'd use $http to make requests back to the API you wrote with CI: http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$http
I am trying to find the optimal architecture for an ajax-heavy Django application I'm currently building. I'd like to keep a consistent way of doing forms, validation, fetching data, JSON message format but find it exceedingly hard to find a solution that can be used consistently.
Can someone point me in the right direction or share their view on best practice?
I make everything as normal views which display normally in the browser. That includes all the replies to AJAX requests (sub pages).
When I want to make bits of the site more dynamic I then use jQuery to do the AJAX, or in this case AJAH and just load the contents of one of the divs in the sub page into the requesting page.
This technique works really well - it is very easy to debug the sub pages as they are just normal pages, and jQuery makes your life very easy using these as part of an AJA[XH]ed page.
For all the answers to this, I can't believe no one's mentioned django-piston yet. It's mainly promoted for use in building REST APIs, but it can output JSON (which jQuery, among others, can consume) and works just like views in that you can do anything with a request, making it a great option for implementing AJAX interactions (or AJAJ [JSON], AJAH, etc whatever). It also supports form validation.
I can't think of any standard way to insert ajax into a Django application, but you can have a look to this tutorial.
You will also find more details on django's page about Ajax
Two weeks ago I made a write up how I implement sub-templates to use them in "normal" and "ajax" request (for Django it is the same). Maybe it is helpful for you.
+1 to Nick for pages displaying normally in the browser. That seems to be the best starting point.
The problem with the simplest AJAX approaches, such as Nick and vikingosegundo propose, is that you'll have to rely on the innerHTML property in your Javascript. This is the only way to dump the new HTML sent in the JSON. Some would consider this a Bad Thing.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a standard way to replicate the display of forms using Javascript that matches the Django rendering. My approach (that I'm still working on) is to subclass the Django Form class so it outputs bits of Javascript along with the HTML from as_p() etc. These then replicate the form my manipulating the DOM.
From experience I know that managing an application where you generate the HTML on the server side and just "insert" it into your pages, becomes a nightmare. It is also impossible to test using the Django test framework. If you're using Selenium or a similar tool, it's ok, but you need to wait for the ajax request to go return so you need tons of sleeps in your test script, which may slow down your test suite.
If the purpose of using the Ajax technique is to create a good user interface, I would recommend going all in, like the GMail interface, and doing everything in the browser with JavaScript. I have written several apps like this using nothing but jQuery, state machines for managing UI state and JSON with ReST on the backend. Django, IMHO, is a perfect match for the backend in this case. There are even third party software for generating a ReST-interface to your models, which I've never used myself, but as far as I know they are great at the simple things, but you of course still need to do your own business logic.
With this approach, you do run into the problem of duplicating code in the JS and in your backend, such as form handling, validation, etc. I have been thinking about solving this with generating structured information about the forms and validation logic which I can use in JS. This could be compiled at deploy-time and be loaded as any other JS file.
Also, avoid XML. The browsers are slow at parsing it, it is a pain to generate and a pain to work with in the browser. Use JSON.
Im currently testing:
jQuery & backbone.js client-side
django-piston (intermediate layer)
Will write later my findings on my blog http://blog.sserrano.com