I am trying to make a web app using ExpressJS and Coffeescript that pulls data from Amazon, LastFM, and Bing's web API's.
Users can request data such as the prices for a specific album from a specific band, upcoming concert times and locations for a band, etc... stuff like that.
My question is: should I make these API calls client-side using jQuery and getJSON or should they be server-side? I've done client-side requests; how would I even make an API call from the server side?
I just want to know what the best practice is, and also if someone could point me in the right direction for making server-side API requests, that would be very helpful.
Thanks!
There's are two key considerations for this question:
Do calls incur any data access? Are the results just going to be written to the screen?
How & where do you plan to handle errors? How do you handle throttling?
Item #2 is really important here because web services go down all of the time for a whole host of reasons. Your calls to Bing, Amazon & Last FM will fail probably 1% or 0.1% of the time (based on my experiences here).
To make requests users server-side JS you probably want to take a look at the Request package on NPM.
It's often good to abstract away your storage and dependent services to isolate changes and offer a consolidated and consistent web api for your application. But sometimes, if you have a good hypermedia web api (RESTful responses link to other resources), you could reference a resource link from another service in the response from your service (ex: SO request could reference gravatar image/resource of user). There's no one size fits all - it depends on whether you want to encapsulate the dependency or integrate with it.
It might be beneficial to make the web-api requests from your service exposed via expressjs as your own web-apis.
Making http web-api requests is easy from node. Here's another SO post covering that:
HTTP GET Request in Node.js Express
well, the way you describe it I think you may want to fetch data from amazon, lastfm and so on, process it with node, save it in your database and provide your own api.
you can use node's http.request() to fetch the data and build your own rest api with express.js
Related
in my Laravel 5.7/mysql app I need to make external api to read some data from external
app with get request and to write some data to my db with post request.
Which tools/scripts are there for this and how to make these requests safe?
MODIFIED :
Thanks for feedbacks, but looks like I badly put my question
The external app(I do not know what is it written with) need to read data from my app
and write data to my Laravel 5 app.
And how have I to test these requests while on development locally ?
Looks like I have to use Guzzle as in provided link?
Which steps have I to take for safety on my side?
Thanks!
These three libraries are popular for your use-case:
Guzzle
Curl
zttp
If the database is local you can use Eloquent, If not, remote connection to that database may help. otherwise, if you only have API access you should consume eighter of above libraries or any alternative options to make an HTTP request your application might require.
Security-wise, as long as you are only making a request to a remote server, the Suggested way is to store any key or secret string related to authorizing your request (if applicable) in your .env to prevent it from committed to your version control systems. Needless to say to always handle any possible HTTP error your remote API might throw in order to prevent any unwanted error on your application side.
And as Abir Adak mentioned in the comment check this thread for further details.
Updated Answer: On the case of MODIFIED part, generally you have 3 popular options,
REST API
This blog post is a detailed walkthrough written for Laravel
This one from Stack Overflow can help you with designing you API
This last one can help you to develop a widely accepted API response and endpoints by following its specifications.
GraphQL
Can save some time for developing your API, but I suggest to make sure that the consumers of your API are happy to use this option.
GraphQ
Laravel Package for GraphQL
If using Laravel isn't a must, and you are using PostgreSQL, you might want to look at Hasura as well.
SOAP
Have little knowledge on this option for Laravel, just know folks coding using C# and .net are happier to expose their API with this protocol. read more about it on WikiPedia
Postman is a great tool for testing your API or any other API.
My single page app is hosted on Google's cloudstore. I love that I don't have to worry about a server. The app is, naturally, javascript heavy.
Now I would like to add a feature where users can store some data, generate a link to be shared with others and retrieve stored data. Think of a pastebin where some snippet of text is saved and a unique link is generated to be shared with others.
In fact, if it helps, think of this as my attempt to create a pastebin without having to setup a server.
It looks like Google's cloud datastore nosql solution is what I want. Given a key, it will return a snippet of text. However, all the examples on the documentation page imply that I have to setup a back end service using python, node, etc.
Questions:
Can't I just read and write from a web page, perhaps using ajax style http call (since I need to get and put text snippets once data has already been loaded)? I believe I can take care of cross-origin issues by changing some configs in the cloudstore static website server.
Obviously I don't want to serve any encryption keys from the web page. I'm hoping that since my site is served from Google as well, I can configure the nosql service handle permissions intelligently for this scenario.
Is there any documentation which shows how to do this correctly?
Google Datastore is not supposed to be used from client side, it's a served side database. You cannot do that w/o having server side code to authenticate, authorize and validate db related requests.
But there're an alternative. Firebase is a ready to use backend for client side applications, including Javascript apps. It's a separate project, that belongs to Google but not (yet?) part of Google Cloud. Take a look - https://www.firebase.com/
Although the API Rest is still beta, it is possible now to connect from a web client or anything RESTful capabilities. https://cloud.google.com/datastore/reference/rest/
As stated. I am using ruby to perform my task. I am to create a webpage that takes in user input and makes calls using the API back and forth. However, I am yet to understand how to deal with these APIs...
When you consume the API you are essentially making use of the service. So you are sending data and are, potentially, getting something back.
When you write a rest client, you are essentially writing an entity which will consume the API. The rest client could also provide some functionality to ease the consumption of the API, for instance if your API requires a time stamp, the rest client could automatically provide the current time stamp, or else provide the user with a nice UI control to do so easily, rather than type something like this: 22-10-2002 12:10:11 GMT.
The client itself can take different forms. It could be a simple page on a web page, or a more complex desktop or mobile application.
Do I need to send individual entity updates to WebAPI, or can I POST an array of them and send them all at once? It seems like a dumb question, but I can't find anything that says one way or another.
Brad has a blog post that talks about implementing batching support in Web API.
Also, Web API samples project on codeplex has a sample for doing batching in web API hosted on asp.net.
It seems like WEB API 2 has support for this
From the site (Web API Request Batching):
Request batching is a useful way of minimizing the number of messages
that are passed between the client and the server. This reduces
network traffic and provides a smoother, less chatty user interface.
This feature will enable Web API users to batch multiple HTTP requests
and send them as a single HTTP request.
There are a number of samples for different scenarios on this page.
https://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Web+API+Request+Batching
You will have to create an action that accepts a collection of items.
If all you have is an action that accepts a single item than you need to send separate requests.
With batching always think about how you would report the failures and whether a failing of a single item should invalidate the whole batch.
I am creating a web service which uses REST web services. The client side code is written in HTML/JavaScript. My dilemma is whether I
should use the REST resource directly using AJAX calls?
or
should I create Servlets/JSPs (where REST calls will be made and data will be sent to client(AJAX/JAVSCRIPT)).
I have seen many web apps which follow the 2nd procedure but seems to me that it's doing the same thing as 1st in an indirect way.
Is there any advantage of using 2nd procedure over first?
What is the standard way to use REST services by HTML/javaScript client?
Please let me know if I am even thinking in the right direction and if not please give your valuable insight.
You can use either approach but note that browsers will enforce the same-origin policy on scripts, so if the REST service lives on a different domain than the script you will need to use a servlet/script on the same domain as the script to proxy the call to the other domain. I suspect this is why you are seeing the second approach used.
A proxy/middle-man servlet may also be useful if not all of the response is needed; you could use the servlet to strip out information that is not needed by the JavaScript to reduce the amount of data sent to the browser.
Directly accessing the resource(s) via AJAX has the obvious benefit of less overhead and is IMHO the more elegant solution, however it is also important to note that not all browsers support PUT and DELETE requests natively.
To get around this, you'll likely want to support the common "_method" hack. This stackoverflow question mentions this approach.