I'm writing a Android app and every time someone install it he must connect to a web server to get a updated data that it needs to work properly. The app does that only one time and after that is good to go on his own. Is a really small information, 1mb at top. But considering a lot of installation(hopefully) I was wondering what is the best framework to do that. What's your opinion?
Since this app is made in Java I was thinking about doing this "server side" part a RESTful service with Springboot but I don't know if it can handle a lot of simultaneous connections. And I don't think I'll need to implement "POST", "DELETE", "PUT". I just need(as far as I can see) to implement "GET". That's why I'm not sure if REST service is good idead. What do you people think?
Speaking from my experience there are a lot of good frameworks that enable you to build backend applications and there is already a lot of comparisons you can find about it on web.
Since you are good at java I think springboot would be a good be really good option. Springboot is an excellent framework that is core to a lot of enterprise applications that use springboot and hence you don't have to worry about the performance. It would absolutely work well for you.
But if you are looking to quickly develop an application you could try with flask or django and both of them have also proved their mettle.
If you are good with javascript you could even try node. Except node maynot perform well for CPU intensive tasks but probably work very well if you are looking to fetch data with GET requests.
All of the above have a huge community support and hence you wouldn't have a problem learning it.
But if you are looking to implement something really really fast and not much complex checkout firebase. It might do the trick for you.
Related
My end-of-term assignment is to build a web-based student management application which connects to a MySQL database. However, the teacher does not allow us to use JS/ node because he says it is not OOP. Besides from JS, the members in our group can only use Java.
Therefore, I want to ask if it's it possible to do this assignment with just Java. If it is, what are the things I need to know and learn? Else, is it possible to learn PHP in 1 month for this kind of project?
Thank you very much for reading!
Yes it is possible to write a webserver in Java without any external (i.e. not Java SE) libraries. All you need to do is:
Learn about Socket and ServerSocket and the SSL stack, and ...
Spend a few days reading the HTTP specification in sufficient detail to understand what the protocol requires.
Spend a few more days implementing a server-side HTTP protocol stack and so on.
Which is ... a lot of effort, and probably a waste of you / your team's time.
If you are going to implement this in Java, you would be much better off either learning Spring / SpringMVC / SpringBoot, or learning Servlets and/or JSPs. They deal with the protocol side for you, and (more or less) leave you to focus on the aspects that are specific to your webapp.
These technologies (or equivalents) are what you are likely to use when you graduate.
If the other members of your team already know Java, that would be an obvious good reason to use it.
In short, there are 3 reasons to use Java + the above technologies:
Less effort
Less learning for your other team members1
You / they will be learning more immediately useful things.
PHP would be another alternative, though if your teachers are "down" on Javascript for being "not OO enough", they are probably unlikely to think well of PHP either.
On the topic of whether Javascript is OO or not, read this:
Is JavaScript object-oriented?
Read it and make up your own mind.
1 - How about volunteering to write all of the project's documentation so that you don't have to learn Java. No? You want to learn Java, don't you!
Sure you can write a web app in Java. Depending on what you're allowed to use there are tons of options. Just a short overview, further down means you need more 3rd party code but productivity goes up:
Build in on the JDK only. You'll need to build the WebServer on your own and compose HTML... (Only do this if requirements are strictly forbidding 3rd party libraries)
Use a servlet container like tomcat. You'll still have to build HTML on your own but request handling is mostly done for you. (Use this if a servlet container is all you're allowed to use)
Use a templating engine like JSP, Thymeleafe, Velocity. You will be able to build web pages quite easily. (This would already work conveniently, yet there are still better options)
Use an web application framework. This will take most boilerplate from you and allow you to use advanced concepts with little effort. There are multiple frameworks to choose from. I prefer Spring Boot and would recommend to start with s.th. like this (This will automatically provide much of what is asked from you, so check if you can use such a framework).
A few months ago I created a shop manager software for one of our customers.
One of the requirements was Adobe ColdFusion. Nevertheless, I came up with a really nice product, simple and fast, a few nice ideas and some positive feedbacks.
Now I think I am ready for letting "bigger" customers see my project.
I prefer not to write that next version in ColdFusion, I'm looking for something much more scalable and reliable.
The cloud computing, actually, is making me really curious! In particular, Google AppEngine seems to have all I need:
I know Java
I could start from scratch, without paying anything
It's Google, what's more reliable than it?
I made a few helloworld-s, looking for the best technology to use.
GWT is really nice, but my dev team loves html+css "page centric" apps, so I think it would be a too high jump. Instead of it I was considering:
Spring MVC 3.x
Objectify 4 (as a persistence manager, instead of JDO/JPA)
My questions are:
Based on your experiences, do you think that GAE is suitable for developing and hosting a "shop manager" software, which will manage tables (CRUD), make reports, and so on? My projects is really simple.
Do the two technology I mentioned are good and enough for such a project? What will I need in addition?
I've made an pretty standard shop, using: Appengine + Spring + Groovy + Objectify (and backbonejs + google closure templates for client side)
And from my experience I can say:
It's possible :)
Such system requires a lot of transactions - it's possible, but not so trivial using appengine. There is a lot of transactions, and a lot of work
Reports is better to prepare on background (taskqueue/cron/prospectivesearch), and it's hard to prepare 'on-demand' or custom reports (actually it's must be done on background anyways)
I'm happy with my current implementation, but I see that using an standard RDBMS fits much better for this type of projects.
PS And also, you can take a look at CloudFoundry, I didn't tried it yes, but seems that it's good thing too and it have PostreSQL as service
I was wondering if someone who was experienced in both technologies could give an objective comparison between the two, assuming you were building a complex web application that would be both very rich in on the server and in the browser.
One problem with the older paradigm, for me, is testability of the Spring MVC layer. I find that there's a lot of bugs that can creep into your application due to untestable annotations. This model also slows development cycles because you have to restart the server to make changes to the annotations/controller code... which is something I personally find very annoying.
I also don't want to deal with the complexity of javascript. Working with and testing an application all in Java sounds appealing to me. I don't really want to master another language, and learn all of its quirks, weird design decisions, idiosyncracies and the full history of browser incompatibilities.
So for a complex application, would GWT offer a superior approach? Are there any serious limitations to this approach over Spring MVC, which would probably be more flexible although harder to work with? Are there any gotchas and road blocks that are common for building complex applications?
I would really appreciate a comparison between the two. Please keep in mind that I have no experience with GWT, but about 10+ years experience with Spring. Thank you!
The truth is that also GWT has a learning curve and also at least at the time I looked at it, two years ago, you're not doing much with the basic controls, you need external libraries and that means more learning.
After trying to learn GWT without much success, I opted for a webservice plus either jQuery or ExtJS, which also gives a very clean separation of the roles. I sat down and learnt JavaScript, it wasn't easy but it was immensely more fun than using GWT.
As for browser compatibility, once you use a modern library, you'll have very few of them. My code works in all browsers without too many problems, including IE 6. Also when I am too busy, I write the services only and outsource the JavaScript interface part, which allows increased productivity.
Anyway, this is fairly subjective, another person fluent with GWT, can have an opposite point of view of mine. I will anyway reject the following reasons:
ease of debugging. Not true anymore: it's very easy to debug JavaScript with FireBug, plus there won't be any business logic in JavaScript, only services call and display.
browser compatibility. There are very few quirks to remember, the most common one is that IE doesn't accept trailing commas in lists, which is anyway not in the standard, but Firefox tolerates them. Any modern JavaScript library will take care of compatibility for you.
Speed. To start with I will state that JavaScript is very fast for any reasonable computation within the browser. What is slower is DOM manipulation and of course anything involving the network, like AJAX calls. Your page will perform just right if you don't do design mistakes, like stuffing too many things or other problems that can arise when adding many elements directly to the DOM, instead of building your structure and then attaching it all at once.
As far as I can think now, the only valid reason is, I already know Java, I don't want to study another language.
As for your comment on Spring MVC. I am using Spring MVC and I don't feel the pain of restarting the server. The whole point of Spring is that everything should be easy to work with outside the container! In the Spring controllers I've very minimal code that just call the underlying services. What I need to unit test well are the services.
The controllers have very few code to test, I could just call them and test them within JUnit, but, at least for now, my approach is having a simple external test done through a web page with jQuery calls that check their response (it's not unit test, it's an integration test, but I feel there is a very little value to unit test a controller, if it's written properly).
I am using GWT for more than a year now in a complex project (200 KLOC for the whole project), and I recommend you to give GWT a try.
In my opinion GWT is quite easy to learn, there are really good tutorials about how one should use this technology.
The advantage of using GWT is that one can build nice, fast, maintainable web apps, without knowing very little about browsers or javascript. You can also debug your client side code with a Java debugger and in complex apps this is huge.
Although GWT offers the possibility to properly unit test the client side code, this requires a good understanding of GWT's MVP paradigm and careful planning. If you mess up your code (which is not that hard, because GWT gives you total freedom) then you are going to end up losing this feature, but this is your fault, not GWT's.
It took me a couple of months to learn Spring well enough to create fairly basice MVC apps. It took me about a month to master GWT. (It could be that it was easier because I had already worked with Android for three years and it works similar. It even has the exact same unobvious solutions to some of its problems.) So for me, GWT was definitely much easier to learn than Spring.
What is the best Lightweight/high performance embedded web-server for implementing REstful API. I need to interface it with java code.
can anyone suggest me the best solution for it? as I am newbie in this field
Regards,
I think finding "the best" cotnainer in terms of performance is very hard task and it is based on your particular use case, meaning - how will you use it? Since it's RESTful API, I guess you will be interested in serving large number of clients with some simple services. So if I were you, I would look for server which is stable for huge amount of requests.
Please check out this interesting article to give you more insights on the performance topic.
Personally, I would go with embedded tomcat or jetty.
Perhaps Jetty is what you're looking for, although it would be a good idea to also check others (like Tomcat, for instance) to see which one's the most suitable for your needs.
I plan to start a mid sized web project, what language + framework would you recommend?
I know Java and Python. I am looking for something simple.
Is App Engine a good option? I like the overall simplicity and free hosting, but I am worried about the datastore (how difficult is it to make it similarly fast as a standard SQL solution? + I need fulltext search + I need to filter objects by several parameters).
What about Java with Stripes? Should I use another framework in addition to Stripes (e.g. for database).
UPDATE:
Thanks for the advice, I finally decided to use Django with Eclipse/PyDev as an IDE.
Python/Django is simple and elegant, it's widely used and there is a great documentation. A small disadvantage is that perhaps I'll have to buy a VPS, but it shouldn't be very hard to port the project to App Engine, which is free to some extent.
Since you mentioned python, I would suggest looking into Django. You may need to look harder for hosting options, however...
Is App Engine a good option? I like the overall simplicity and free hosting, but I am worried about the datastore (how difficult is it to make it similarly fast as a standard SQL solution? + I need fulltext search + I need to filter objects by several parameters).
App Engine is nice. It supports Python or Java (with some limitations), and it provides free hosting for small needs (rare, at least for Java). But I wouldn't expect the exact same performances as with dedicated servers, the cloud is about scalability, not performance (you won't always get the fastest response time for a single hit; however, GAE would handle gazillions of concurrent hits without any problem while your servers would be on fire). But this scalability is not without cost; if you don't need it, the development tradeoffs may be too much trouble. And also note that it does not support full-text search out of the box (what an irony), you will have to use extra tooling.
What about Java with Stripes? Should I use another framework besides Stripes (e.g. for database).
I like Stripes very much. I love its conventions over configuration approach, it's a very elegant and simple framework (but still powerful). Definitely not a bad choice. For persistence, if you go for GAE, you will have to use JPA or JDO. If you don't, it's at your discretion (although I would go for JPA).
See also
Google AppEngine - A Second Look
As many things in life, this depends on what your goals are. If you intend to learn a web framework that is used in corporate environments, then choose a Java solution. If not, don't. Python is certainly more elegant and generally more fun in pretty much every way.
As to which framework to use, django has the most mindshare, as evidenced by the number of questions asked about it here. My understanding is that it's also pretty good. It's best suited for CMS-like web sites, though - at least that's what it's coming from and what it's optimized for. You might also have a look at one of the simpler, nimbler ones, such as the relatively new flask. All of these are enjoyable, though they may not all have all features on AppEngine.
Kay and Tipfy are excellent Python framework choices when you target specifically GAE. Kay is modelled after and similar to Django, but is better suited to GAE.
I've been kick App Engine around a little bit, and so far the DataStore is pretty quick... there is a bit of a learning curve compared to SQL, but I've had no real issues. I'm not sure about fulltext search, however filtering is simple, you would just run each filter one at a time.
class DBModel(db.Model):
field1 = db.StringProperty()
field2 = db.StringProperty()
field3 = db.IntegerProperty()
GQLObj = DBModel.all().filter('field1 =', 'Foo')
GQLObj = GQLObj.filter('field2 =', 'Bar')
As far as hosting, with GAE I'm not sure you even get a choice, I know you can register your own domain with google though.
I don't think the datastore is a problem. Many people will reject it out of hand because they want a standard relational database; if you are willing to consider a datastore in general then I doubt you will have any problems with the GAE datastore. Personally, I quite like it.
The thing that might trip you up is the operational limitations. For example, did you know that an HTTP request must complete within 10 seconds?
What if you get 50% of the way through a project and then find that a web service you are using sometimes take 15 seconds to respond? Now you are toast. You can't pay extra to get the limit raised or anything like that.
So, my point is that you must approach GAE with great care. Learn about the limitations and make sure that they will not be a problem before you start using it.
It depends on your personality. There's no right answer to this question any more than there's a right answer to "what kind of car should I drive?"
If you're artistic and believe code should be beautiful, use Rails.
If you're a real hacker type, I think you'll find a full-stack framework such as Rails or Django to be unsatisfying. These frameworks are "opinionated" software, which means you have to really embrace the author's vision to be most productive.
The wonderful thing about web development in the Python world is there's several great minimal frameworks. I've used several, including web.py, GAE's webapp, and cherrypy. These frameworks are like "here's a request, give me a string to serve up." It's raw. Don't think you'll be stuck in Python concatenating strings though, God no. There's also several excellent templating libraries for Python. I can personally recommend Cheetah but Mako also looks good.
Google App Engine + GWT and you have a pretty powerful combination for developing web applications. The datastore is quite fast, and it has so far done the job quite nicely for me.
In my project I had to do a lot of redesigning of my database model, because it was made for a traditional relational database, and some things were not (directly) possible with the datastore.
GWT has a fairly moderate learning curve, but it gets the job done very well. The gui code is really easy to get started with, but it's the asynchronous way of thinking that's the hardest part.
As for search I don't think it's supported in the framework. Filtering is possible on parameters.
There are some limitations to GAE, and you should consider them before putting all your eggs in that basket. The fact that GAE uses J2EE distribution standards makes the application very easy to move to a dedicated server, should the limitations of GAE become a problem. In fact I only think you would have to refactor the part of your code that makes the queries and stores the data (which shouldn't be much more than 100 lines).
I've built several apps on GAE (with Python) over the last year. It's hard to beat the ease with which you can get an app up and running quickly. Don't discount the value in that alone.
While you may not understand the datastore yet, it is extremely well documented and there are great resources - including this one - to help you get past any problem you might have.