Everyone remembers google browser sync right? I thought it was great. Unfortunately Google decided not to upgrade the service to Firefox 3.0. Mozilla is developing a replacement for google browser sync which will be a part of the Weave project. I have tried using Weave and found it to be very very slow or totally inoperable. Granted they are in a early development phase right now so I can not really complain.
This specific problem of browser sync got me to thinking though. What do all of you think of Mozilla or someone making a server/client package that we, the users, could run on your 'main' machine? Now you just have to know your own IP or have some way to announce it to your client browsers at work or wherever.
There are several problems I can think of with this: non static IPs, Opening up ports on your local comp etc. It just seems that Mozilla does not want to handle this traffic created by many people syncing their browsers. There is not a way for them to monetize this traffic since all the data uploaded must be encrypted.
Mozilla Weave is capable of running on personal servers. It uses WebDAV to communicate with HTTP servers and can be configured to connect to private servers. I've tried setting it up on my own servers but with no success (Mainly because I'm not very good at working with Apache to configure WebDAV)
I'm hoping Mozilla Weave eventually allows FTP access so I can easily use my server to host my firefox profile.
If you're interested in trying Mozilla Weave on a personal server, there's a tutorial here:
http://marios.tziortzis.com/page/blog/article/setting-up-mozilla-weave-on-your-server/
Browser Sync is up on Google Code now. Doesn't look like anything has been done with it yet though, as far as making it hosted on personal servers/computers.
I've been using the Firefox Scrapbook extension, sync'd via FolderShare. It takes a little setup, but the nice thing is that Scrapbook grabs a local copy of each page so it works offline or if the site goes away.
Not a complete solution to this problem, but I've found FoxMarks to be a really nice bookmark syncing extension.
Related
So I have multiple clients using an app built in electron. The entire application is actually a number of electron windows that talk to each other. When I have an update for the client side code (html/js/css) I have to have them shutdown, and run a utility that downloads from our internal server to update their app. I would like to know if there is a way I can either push new code to the clients (maybe through a socket) to overwrite the old code, or even maybe poll our 'code server' for updates, and then have it automatically update/overwrite existing code.
Is this possible? Is there functionality built in to electron that allows this?
And, if possible, how can it be accomplished? i.e. is there a library I can look at that will help me?? (i found a filesaver.js library, but its not exactly what I need). Thanks in advance.
You can have your Electron app load all code from a server every startup and cache this locally. You can do this by simply hosting your electron code on a web server and pointing Electron at the URL. You could make the app work offline by using a Service Worker.
This isn't a great idea though as code loaded from the internet will have access to all the node APIs. You will have essentially made a DIY botnet and securing it from abuse can be tricky.
You should read Security, Native Capabilities, and Your Responsibility in the Electron docs and be sure you understand the implications.
You can use the built-in autoUpdater of Electron: https://electronjs.org/docs/api/auto-updater
You need a server the autoUpdater can talk to, to download the updates from. The updates are installed after download.
You can host a server by yourself or use a service like https://www.update.rocks/
What you need is electron updater and you can use electron-builder for that.
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.
In my pursuit to write a Chrome packaged app, I am struggling to get my data synchronized to the app so that it can be used in offline mode.
My data lives on a server and I access it trough a restful service in this case I use.net MVC WebApi
What I have tried: Using Breezejs because of the easy offline capabilities ; the problem is that
window.localStorage
is not available in packaged apps, I did tried switching it out for IndexedDB but no luck.
I tried chrome.storage that worked great with the build in sync but it is not a big truck and that is what I need at least a 10tunner.
So my Question; is there a silver bullet that has some XMLHttpRequest implementations, that makes it easier to get data from a restful service, storing it to IndexedDB so that it can be used offline and when going online syncs the changes, that is compatible with packaged apps.
I know I must probably write my own but if someone already went trough all the hoops and complexities of synchronization that can guide me it will be awesome.
Have you looked at using the syncFileSystem API ?
As long as you are happy to sync your data into Google Drive, this api should meet your needs for not implementing sync code yourself and still working offline.
I plan to implement my website (asp.net & sql2008) using windows azure, but I have difficulty to do it because windows azure has not released yet in my location (Indonesia).
Should someone like to share the solution the same with my problem would be appreciated.
The question was asked on MSDN and the answer is that it is not possible. The only solution is to wait for Windows Azure available in your country.
MSDN Forum
Just run your apps on HK or Singapore Windows Azure Public Data Centers, these are the APAC Data Centers for your region.
for testing reasons, I wanted to create an Azure account, and faced the same here in Egypt.
I've made it by remotely logging into one of our U.S-based servers, and registered from there :) If you can't do so, and need this account badly, and don't have such server, try using TOR.
Update: TOR is a proxy-like solution for your internet connection, it will redirect all requests/responses to a node on the TOR network, which consists of volunteers like you and me.
so my solution is simple, we gonna use tor to simulate that you are inside one of the permitted countries, and register your account with ease.
what you gonna need is to install TOR and configure your browser to use it, but my personal recommendation is to install TOR browser bundle, it's TOR+a Browser that is pre-configured to use it.
you gonna find a nice video on the TOR browser bundle page that will give you an overview about it.
give it a try, and tell me what happened.
I want to be able to synchronize several text files on a user's PC in real time from my web application. Basically I want a few data files on the local PC to mirror the state of a user's data in my web application so if the web application or the user's internet connection is lost he can use those data files to get some critical info (possibly using html/javascript code stored in with those files that would run in offline mode on those data files.)
I know that google gears has a lot of interesting tools for working with offline state, but I'd prefer an even simpler application in html/javascript that wouldn't be as reliant on google gears. I'd rather use google gears to just create those files and slowly keep them in synch with the web application's version of data throughout the day.
Update on answers:
PersistJS is a good suggestion I will look into, but I was hoping people would direct me towards really good Google Gears tutorials resources.
You can save data on the browser using PersistJS, which uses the best client-side persistent storage mechanism it can find, supporting:
Flash
Google Gears
HTML 5 storage specs
browser-specific extensions
cookies
When your app reconnects, you can resync. Creating and reading text files is something the browser will generally block your web site from doing.
Risking of stating the obvious; if you want to store user state locally, isn't cookies the standard way?
maybe more then one cookie will be needed, but that sounds like the simplest of ways.
You're going to need to make an ActiveX control and a FireFox plugin to get these permissions. Short of that I agree with orip try using PersistJS
You can ask the user to download a subversion client that is predefined to interface with your subversion server only. Then write your web application to interface with the subversion service from your side only.
There is a good deal of security harm associated with granting access to a user's file system so you will want to lock down all possible points of exploitation. You will want to ensure that the user cannot access the subversion server except through the client that you ask them to install. You will want to ensure the connection between the application server and the subversion server is extremely secure so that the transmission path cannot be compromised and that malicious logic that may be loaded onto the application server cannot access the subversion server. I would say to encrypt the transmission path between those two servers and put the subversion server behind the firewall separating your network DMZ. I would also suggest use a challenge/response mechanism between the application server and the subversion server to prevent malicious code from appearing to be legitimate decisions made on the application server. Also, ensure that data only flows form the application server to the subversion server in a unidirectional fashion only, because if there is malicious logic planted on your application server then any data that comes from the subversion server is compromised without even accessing that server.
you could use the File System Object FSO through javascript, however it is dependant on Microsoft as it is an ActiveX control, it would also require permissions in the browser, or perhaps a HTA (HTML Application).
http://www.webreference.com/js/column71/
Its a real security issue so most avenues are closed down inhrentley.
Inherently the web model was designed not to authorize upstream from server to client. Now things are changing slowly maybe could you do this with Websocket ?