I have seen this question asked several times but the answers have so far been very robotic and disappointing:
What is the difference between EWS vs EAS?
Now, most sites give the following: "One is a protocol for mobile devices, the other is a web service." Well, no shit. Here's the real question:
What is stopping someone from setting up a descent library for EWS that any mobile app or OS could use instead of paying MS a per-user license fee for ActiveSync? Is EWS too expensive, since it's SOAPy instead of RESTful? Is ActiveSync doing more of the heavy lifting in terms of caching and general logic? Does EAS have some feature that EWS doesn't have (shared calendars or some such?) Is it really just a matter of mobile OSs wanting to ensure that Exchange 03 is supported?
I'm sure they each have their finer points that make them distinct, but the question that I think most people are getting at when this question gets asked is "Why should I pay for EAS if EWS can do the same thing and more if I'm willing to write the client side myself?"
Most organizations will license EAS because one or more of the following is true for them:
They want to allow existing mobile devices (iOS, Android, etc) to access their services without requiring new software to be installed on them (EAS is supported on lots of devices). Zimbra and Kerio do this, for example.
They can't use EWS as a client protocol to access their Exchange services, but EAS is available.
They want to operate in a low-bandwidth environment and can't afford the weighty overhead of SOAP within EWS compared to the compressed WBXML of EAS.
I'd wager that #1 makes up the vast majority of them.
Aside: EAS is not RESTful. Everything goes over POST, there's no hypermedia or ability for the client to do content negotiation. It's basically session-oriented RPC, using WBXML as an encoding format and HTTP as a transmission protocol.
Related
I know asking this question here is not proper, I feel sorry for that.
I have tried searching websites, Amazon and Alibaba, but fail to find any product can support Eddystone-EID.
So, I think developers in stack overflow may know any product can support Eddystone-EID.
Could you share any any information for that?
The two vendors below claim to sell beacons compatible with Eddystone-EID as of October 2021:
Gimbal
Estimote Location Beacons
Before you buy anything beware that Google shut down their beacon platform web services in April 2021. I wrote a full blog post to explain what this means: Eddystone is Dead, Long Live Eddystone!
Using these web services is completely optional for Eddystone-UID and Eddystone-URL, but critical for Eddystone-EID, because the beacon identifier rotates with a crypto algorithm and a “trusted resolver” server is needed to convert the advertised “ephemeral identifier” from jibberish to something meaningful and useful.
Without Google’s beacon platform web services, I am aware of no commercially available trusted resolver for Eddystone-EID. You would need to build your own, which is a non-trivial effort. Without a trusted resolver Eddystone-EID is worthless.
Because of this, make sure the vendors above still support using their products with Eddystone-EID. In time, it is likely they will remove support in their beacon firmware.
Finally, it is important to note that just because Google gave up on their beacon web services, most apps that use Eddystone, iBeacon and Altbeacon are unaffected. Beacons are standardized and will work forever — just don’t use Google web services! Again, beacon technology aside from Eddystone-EID has no need for Google web services.
I want to start to create a website which is opened on a mobile phone (any kind of smartphone). This website will have the feature to control a website you have already opened on your computer. (The Volkswagen New Century Beetle from 2011 had the feature, that i could scroll via smartphone on the website opened on my desktop computer)
We have a streaming website for horsevideos, and this will be an awesome feature for our customers, if they could watch the streams on their smart tv and control via iphone/android/wp.
Also wilmaa.com from switzerland provides a remote control for smartphone to navigate on my website on smart tv/webbrowser.
Because I need a starting point to learn how it works i was checking Google, maybe there already any remote controls outside, but unfortunately i couldn't find anything.
Maybe Stack Overflow can help me by giving some starting points on how to realize this.
To do this you need some kind of 'pushing' service able to overcome the inherent drawback of HTTP that it has always been a 'pull only' system - client initiates a request, server answers. In this case you want to push an event from the server to the client.
For the past years this has been done with so called 'long polling'. This means that you 'abuse' the mechanism present in browsers that protects the server from hanging requests, but allows them to take a while. Apache is by default configured to allow a request to last 300 seconds on most platforms. Long polling works by sending an Ajax request, and if the server has no data, instead of sending that back it just waits, until either it does have data, or a long period such as a minute has expired. The client does not send a new request until it has received a response. This gives the illusion to the end user of real time feedback, and is how sites like Facebook et al have done this for years.
Since a few months it's also possible to employ a new HTML5 technology that now has stable implementations on all major browsers: Websockets. This technology allows a server to upgrade a common pull request to a full bidirectional connection, allowing realtime communication between browser and server. Regrettably, the 'regular' webservers such as Apache are not really built for this kind of logic, although it is possible to emulate it with frameworks like Ratchet. For the realtime part of the system the current platform of choice for most sites, including Stack Overflow here, is node.js - serverside asynchronous Javascript.
What I would recommend in your situation:
Set up a separate node.js server as an event dispatcher (you can get a cheap micro sized EC2 instance at Amazon for like $15 per month which will probably suffice, and is very scalable)
Keep all the other code in the regular environment where it is now, just add logic to communicate with the event dispatcher
Deploy Socket.io as your websocket handling service. It simplifies all the Javascript logic on both server and client side, and wraps a realtime connection in such a way that it's even compatible with IE5.5, by gracefully degrading towards technologies that are supported by both server and client - websockets on recent browsers, long polls or other technologies on legacy systems.
With this solution you can easily implement, with relatively little code, a system with full realtime responsiveness across multiple platforms as you described.
As for the controlling app itself, just use HTML5, with Phonegap if you intend to distribute to app stores.
I have a desktop application which uses flat files (some xml and small pictures) as data. I want this data to be available on other PCs which have the desktop application installed and usable by a smartphone client (WP7 at the moment) as well.
The user should have it very easy to synchronize this data. He should be able to use accounts he already possesses (Live-Login, Googlemail, Facebook,...).
I thought about using Azure Blob Storage to save the data in Azure, the Sync Framework to perform the actual synchronization and the Access Control Service to handle authentication.
I have not used any of this technologies before so any advice would be great but I'm searching foremost for errors or shortcomings in this strategy I don't see yet. Is this approach viable at all?
Windows Azure is basically a virtualized datacentre. It is elaborate and complicated and is pitched at corporations who don't want to own their server infrastructure or hardware.
If I understand correctly, what you want is a cloud fileserver, not a whole LAN. Windows SkyDrive fulfils this requirement nicely and offers 25GB of storage per member with no charge for membership.
About Hotmail and Windows Live People often confuse Hotmail and
Windows Live, because when you set up a Hotmail account it uses
Windows Live for authentication and therefore you end up with a
Windows Live account and all the associated facilities, including
SkyDrive. However, it is entirely possible to set up a Windows Live
account using any email address as the username.
If you do this, it is important to be aware that the Windows Live
password associated with a given email address is completely
independent of the password required by the mail server that hosts
mail for the account. This can cause a great deal of user confusion.
For Hotmail (or any other mail server that uses Windows Live for
authentication) they are guaranteed to be the same password.
There is no official Microsoft framework support for SkyDrive. There is an open source project called SkyDriveApiClient, but it only works with the full .NET framework. I tried porting it but the author was a bit of an architecture astronaut, and it is absolutely riddled with [Serializable] which is not available on WP7x.
The WP7 guys have said that the WP7 framework will probably include support for SkyDrive but not in Mango (WP7.1) and given that Microsoft's typical release cycle is 18 months and Mango has yet to hit the streets, I'd say it will be two years before you can count on intrinsic cloud file services for WP7.
Roll-your-own wouldn't be hard, WCF services are dead easy to use from WP7. But that's not really cloud since you have to provide and maintain the server infrastructure yourself. For this reason and given the MS timetable, I have put a great deal of effort into producing my own SkyDrive client for WP7. Core functionality is complete and I am now refactoring, improving robustness and adding performance enhancements like local cacheing of tokens (cookies, essentially). I don't intend to release it; I have a number of apps planned that depend on this functionality and it suits me fine that there is a substantial barrier to competition.
I didn't tell you that to tease you. My point is that I'm so sure SkyDrive is the right answer that I put a lot of work into making it happen.
Cloud file storage is a perfect fit for mobile devices.
Azure is not a good answer for the sort of phone apps individuals want because the data store isn't shared in a way that required indexing or supports high levels of concurrency
I can certainly think of corporate phone apps that would benefit from using SQL Server as storage
Azure can do file services but it represents an ongoing expense. Nobody's going to put up with that when Google and Microsoft both give away web based cloud storage.
I can personally attest that if you're determined, it is possible to use SkyDrive from WP7.
Cloud storage is the only way you're going to get programmatically accessible storage that's shared by your user's mobile device and his computer. One of the things I intend to do that depends on shared storage is write a Silverlight app that lets you prepare map routes with multiple waypoints on a desktop computer and a companion app that uses them on WP7.
The Windows Live team has released what they call support for WP7. They supply a sample project showing you how to instantiate a browser object and load their login pages and manipulate them to log in and use their javascript API to manipulate SkyDrive.
This has one big advantage: browser cookies and cached credentials. The disadvantages are obvious; technical shortcomings notwithstanding the Windows Live team seems to think the only thing people want to do with a phone is tag their photos and fiddle with social media.
I have finished my own libraries. They do not support most of the social media twaddle. I have treated SkyDrive as no more or less than a cloud file system, providing
Authenticate(username, password)
CreateFolder(folderpath[, blocking=false])
Delete(fileOrFolderPath[, blocking=false])
SaveString(filepath, value[, blocking=false])
LoadString(filepath)
I could handle binaries but Convert.ToBase64 makes this unnecessary and strings are convenient for XML. CreateFolder, Delete and SaveString are optionally blocking. LoadString is always blocking because it's a function that returns the loaded string. CreateFolder is recursive so you can create an entire path in one call (eg /folder1/folder2/folder3). Calling CreateFolder on a pre-existing path has no effect, and SaveString uses CreateFolder to ensure the path is valid, making it unnecessary to create a filepath in advance. Authenticate loads the file system (except file content) into memory eliminating server chatter. This is asynchronous and a FileSystemReady event announces when the file system is completely loaded. The model is maintained as you add and remove files and folders.
This was a lot of work and no one reponded to my attempt to make it an open source project so I'm not inclined to give the fruits of my labour away, but provided your plans don't compete with mine I could be persuaded to come to an arrangement.
My company is working on a project to develop a desktop and mobile email client that can connect to different mail servers with minimal configuration for users or server admins. We want to be able to support Exchange but I've realised after some research that there are a number of issues to think about. Our goal is to be able to connect to as many types of Exchange server as possible, so we need to choose a protocol, or protocols to implement that will allow that. It seems there are 3 different protocols in use - WebDAV for older 2000/2003/2007 servers, Exchange Web Services (EWS) for 2007/2010+ servers and ActiveSync which is supported by everything post 2003 (I think).
My question is, which do you think is the best approach for implementation?
-ActiveSync seems to have the most coverage but is the biggest pain to implement. Would a dual implementation of WebDAV + EWS provide the same coverage?
Also, if there are any Exchange Admins out there, which protocols tend to be enabled by default? If WebDAV/EWS are always turned off by default then maybe ActiveSync is the only option. It seems that as the iPhone and Android support ActiveSync it is most likely to be turned on, but what about the others?
Also, would be interesting to have statistics of what servers are currently in use - i.e. how many are still using 2003, have migrated to 2010 etc.
Would like to hear your opinions.
Cheers,
Kevin
If you are building an email client and targeting Exchange, I would recommend ActiveSync. The other protocols -- WebDAV and EWS -- were not intended for generic email clients. EWS, for example, does not support transactions or syncing, so if you have multiple clients you will have to deal with tons of race conditions on your own. WebDAV requires some funky limitations and is not always enabled. ActiveSync is relatively easy to write, it just requires getting a license from Microsoft, and it always works with Exchange.
If you just want to send and read email, however, don't overlook IMAP and POP3. You'll find the broadest support for those, even though are disabled in the newest installations.
About Versions:
2003 should be hard to find, as it is out of any Support.
A lot companies have skipped 2007 Version, so you should find a lot of 2010/2013 installations.
Although Exchange 2016 was released back in october, I assume, that there arent too much installations out there (2016 is more like a CU to 2013 :) )
I am investigating developing an app for Windows Phone 7 that requires access to email/calendar information from Exchange Server (read only).
The way I see it there are 2 options EWS or ActiveSync.
WP7 only supports Basic Authentication.
By default on Exchange server installations the EWS virtual directory has Basic Authentication disabled meaning a configuration change of Exchange Server to allow EWS to be used.
The ActiveSync protocol looks like it would take some time to get your head around and develop an implementation.
The questions are
1. How common is it for people to enable basic authentication for EWS? Is this something that most businesses are likely to not want to do?
How difficult is it to learn and use the ActiveSync protocol? Is it something that could be done in days, weeks or months?
1) To find out about the common configuration of EWS servers I'd spek to some sysadmins and ask them. Maybe try on https://serverfault.com/
1) How difficult something is to learn very much depends on the skills and experience of the person learning and the teaching resources available. This is a non-trivial protocol so I wouldn't expect learning it to take days. There will also be a licensing cost of implementing Excahange ActiveSync which I suspect would make it an expensive option.
Option 3: Create your own web service that acts as a proxy to EWS and does the authentication for you. Ugly and a bit painful, but if your app is architected well, once WP7 supports better authentication, switching to directly hit EWS should be pretty simple.
ActiveSync is painful and does not support everything that EWS supports. I would recommend going the EWS route if you have that option.
If your going to use ActiveSync, think again... it uses wbxml and you would need to create your own API for doing calls - this means crating tokenized blobs which must be 100% perfect and account for all aspects of whatever type of messaging items you are going against or will risk creating bad items or even poison ones. The devistation caused by bad EAS calls could well exceed your customer base... so, you need to be very careful. Also, while the specs are public, it needs an very expensive license. If you license, you would need to get a support contract with a specific schedule in order to get develper support. With a team of developers, it will likely take 3-5 or so years to do a full implementation client side and work out most of the bugs. So, as far as the skills in email development, you and your other developers would need to be pretty hard-core. There may be third party APIs which wrap EAS calls... however, you should be sure that they are licensed and that that the license would cover your development - so, you would need to research those on your own.
EWS has more features and is far, far easier to use and is what is suggested... further, there is no special licensing, etc.
Using a proxy web service+Exchange Managed APIs so that WP7 can go against Exchange without writting a ton of code:
http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone/getting-started/exchange-client.aspx
... can also use this approach to use NTLM.
Before considering EAS...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdav_101/archive/2011/09/29/new-to-exchange-activesync-development.aspx