We are developing a Q&A site for a client with very limited budget. Site will be developed in ASP.NET MVC 3, and client will have an option to switch between SQL Express and SQL CE.
We would like to have some full text search functionality but don't know what would be the best for this scenario. So far we've seen SOLR and Lucene.NET, but the most likely site will be hosted on some shared hosting so we have to take that into account.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
IMHO bin deployed Lucene.NET is the way to go. You just might need to modify it so that it stores the index in a folder you have write access.
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I'm new to web developing and had to design a website for college. I decided to make it from scratch. I am currently hosting the website on Google Drive and it's working fine. Does this mean that it will work fine on a hosting company's web server? The main reason I ask is because of the many errors I get when using Markup Validation!
There's a lot of variables involved in this decision. The main assumption I'll make is that it's a flat site with no server scripting involved. If that's the case, you shouldn't have any issues copying them over to another web server. Though you should fix up those Markup Validation errors.
When I mention server scripting, I'm referring to PHP/ASP/Coldfusion/etc code that may be in your pages.
Good morning,
I am going to write a web service and I am not sure which framework would suit the situation best. I understand what Node and .Net are good at.
The client will call the services at the following stages:
App loads up - user logins in via Facebook API.
User can create an "entity". This entity will be stored in a database (SQL for .Net/ Azure table for Node) and also posted to a Facebook application (timeline stuff). User can make changes to this at any time.
User can browse Facebook Friends (Facebook API again).
Changes to the entity will be pushed to all users who have "joined" the same entity (SignalR .net/Socket.io Node).
That is the skeleton of the web services, there may be more Facebook calls or CRUD operations. Which Framework will handle this best?
Many thanks.
Aside from the mentioned WebAPI, also consider the excellent ServiceStack for building a webservice.
Any well-written code regardless of the framework will be able to handle it.
If you are a .NET developer I personally think type safety of C# is important so I would not go down the Azure node.js way since it will also force me to use Azure.
I would personally use ASP.NET Web API.
As long as you build your application on a solid framework, you'll be on the bright side (assuming you know how to set-up such an application in a secure and proper manner). For .NET i'd use the Web API and for node.js i'd stick with something like express/connect.
Just keep in mind that node.js and the frameworks based on it are still subject to heavy changes, whereas ASP.NET is production-safe since years.
As a bottom line, i don't think you're able to say "X is better than Y because of Z" in this scenario. It's a matter of personal preferences, infrastructure and your technical skills.
I have a site running using umbraco 4.7.1
The customer wants to create a client-only functionality where the user can upload various files (much like a ftp server) but to their own area within umbraco so each client's files are kept separate.
I am pretty new to Umbraco. How should I go about this?
Thanks
FTP Functionality is not specific to Umbraco or any CMS for that matter. It is configurable in the IIS Server. It could be either the same server where you are running your Umbraco or a different one.
I'm also not much aware about the Umbraco CMS, but most CMS do provide you a way to extend their functionality in the form of plugins/modules. You may write your own Umbraco plugin that does the FTP transfer based on your requirement.
Here is a guide about how to write this FTP client in VB.NET programming language:
http://dot-net-talk.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-to-create-ftp-client-in-vbnet.html
I heard that apps don’t port directly and they have to be specifically written to work with Azure. I’m new to Azure and did some reading but I don’t see anything from their site or documentation that suggests that you must specifically code for Azure, so is it true?
If this question is better suited for another StackExchange site please let me know.
You should take a look at the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit to see some introductory project labs.
While you theoretically can just "drop in" some apps into a Windows Azure VM, it hardly makes sense to do so. Some apps can be migrated with only minor changes, such as an asp.net website - session state is easily handled by AppFabric Cache, and the Web Role VM is Windows Server 2008 with Full IIS. However, you'd still need to integrate with Windows Azure Diagnostics, to be able to have external visibility to the health of your app.
Further, with the example above, there are more optimal things you can do, such as moving static content to blob storage, and taking load off your VMs. This requires you to upload this content, and then change your IMG and other tag URLs to point to a slightly-different URL.
Just remember that you're moving to Windows Azure to take advantage of its platform and related services, not just to be a rack to host a server. To take advantages of these services, you're going to have to target them specifically, such as:
Access control services
Caching
Connectivity (vpn, service bus)
Diagnostics
Database (SQL Azure)
Synchronization services
Traffic management across data centers
This is somewhat true. Your apps will typically run as-is. You just need to add an azure project to the solution, and add your MVC apps as roles to the Azure Project.
I found O'Reilly's "Programming Windows Azure" to be a good conceptual introduction to Azure.
What are the options when it comes to SaaS/hosted full text search? How should I evaluate the different options available?
I'm looking for something that uses Lucene, solr, or sphinx on the backend, and provides a REST API for submitting documents to index, and running searches.
I could build my own EC2 AMI, but I'd have to configure EBS and other stuff, monitor it, etc.
Websolr provides a cloud-based Solr with a control panel. It's in private beta as of this writing, but you can get the service through Heroku.
Another hosted Solr service is PowCloud, also in private beta, which seems to offer strong Wordpress integration.
SolrHQ: another beta service providing a hosted Solr solution, with Joomla and Wordpress integrations.
Acquia Search offers Solr integration for Drupal sites.
If you decide to build your own EC2 instance, the SolrOnAmazonEC2 wiki page might be useful. Or you could just get LucidWorks Solr for EC2, which is probably the easiest and fastest way to get Solr on EC2.
Engine Yard provides a cloud-based Sphinx service.
Indextank is a hosted real-time full text search solution. It's pretty simple to set up (you can get an index running in a couple of minutes) and it's very powerfull (Reddit runs over IndexTank). It provides Java, Python, Ruby and Php clients as well as a Rest API specification. There's an awesome support service (including live chat). You should give it a try.
Another option, particularly for UK people is http://www.netaphorsearch.com/ . I should point out I own Netaphor Ltd. We support the Solr REST API but also have a PHP connector so that you can get up and running very quickly.
Have a look at Artirix - UK company but also in the US http://www.artirix.com. I know they power some sites such as Globrix.com in the UK based on SOLR and have a bunch of other products for crawling and data processing
My five cents
http://indexisto.com/
Offers free hosted Elastic Search if you are ready for advertisement in search results. But anyway you can start with free, and switch to no ads paid account.
It's also not just hosted Elastic Search, but ready to ase Ajax search box (that really impress) to embed to you site (mobile and tablet adopted), and some useful features like statistics, image resizing. There are several options to fill the index with documents - crawler, API and DB connector
Another option for lower-volume websites is Midwestern Mac's hosted Solr search (I am the owner of Midwestern Mac, LLC, just fyi).
Although it's not too hard (if you can use a command line respectably well) to provision your own server on a VPS somewhere...