I am planning an application that will have a web front end (maybe ember) but I want to keep my options open for a native desktop application and/or an android application. I would like the all of the backend logic to be exposed as a RESTful service. The problem that arises in my mind is about user authentication. Since a RESTful service can't keep state on the server, I would need to keep it on the client in javascript. However this is wildly insecure do to the fact that users have the ability to edit the javascript data. What is the correct way to make a client side application communicate with a RESTful backend? I realize that I could just store state on the server anyways(inside the session object), but i would like to follow the REST paradigm. What is the de facto solution for this problem? Thanks in advance.
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I am learning to program Java. My objective is to create client server application based on Java and MySQL.
That would have following.
Server Application where all admin controls would be available to configure.
server application will be the only to have access rights to MySQL.
Server will have all functions and objects that clients will require and call and get that functionality. (Reason for that is "I don't want to share MySQL credentials to client apps or rather i don't want MySQL credentials to be transmitted on the network to clients"). As it would increase maintenance tough and it could be a security loop hole.
An analogy of functionality could be: client calls to server telling to add an Order such addOrder(order_id, payment,..,...,..) and so on.
What are the method in practice for such kind of application these days? A example code/or material to get in right direction would suffice
These days the universal way to expose a service remotely is via a web service. This solution was preferred by the industry over time due to its simplicity and ease of integration to the point that binary based protocols like CORBA are now seldom used.
Take the example of Android applications, they are native application mostly using REST web services.
A REST web service can be easilly integrated in the same way with a desktop application, a mobile application or a web application, even if the clients are written in different native platforms and languages.
As sample code, have a look at tutorials on the Spring stack. For the server see this tutorial for building an hello word REST web service. For the client, consider the REST template.
For security, see this Spring security hello world example. Using the Spring stack in Java will likelly give you the largest number of tutorials and online support.
This sounds like a good place to use RMI, which Java has built in support for. RMI will allow your client to call server-side methods on a local object that corresponds to the server, where all messages/commands get transparently sent to the actual server, where you have your DB access stuff and logic.
Here is the background of my situation:
I want to create an iPad application that interacts with a oracle SQL database. I have existing Java code from my Flex application that handles all the database requests, and modifications using the Spring Framework. The Flex Application ran as a web service through TomCat. Now I want to make that flex application into a mobile iPad version. I am having trouble figuring out what is the easiest way to use existing Java code and use it for the iPad because the iPad interacts using URL requests instead of direct with the Java.
My question is, can I use the existing Java code with the Spring framework to save time from coding all the back-end handling? Basically I want to access all the classes from my Java code by doing Requests from the iPad. Is this possible and will I need JSON or XML to interact between the iPad and the Java code?
Summary:
Can I use
iPad Objective-C <-----> Java (with spring framework) on TomCat Web Service to handle oracle SQL data handeling? If so, how and what technologies do I need? Will I need JSON or XML and how does that factor between the iPad and Java?
Thanks!
A good approach would be to design your app to communicate with RESTful services that return JSON. Once this is done your iPad app doesn't have to even know that the server code is written in Java.. it's just interacting over HTTP.
Here's a good tutorial on setting up your tomcat to host your RESTful services: http://www.vogella.com/articles/REST/article.html - I've used this for an app I'm developing. Spring isn't even necessary.
You could go XML, but JSON is just easier in my opinion. Here's a good blog outlining the good and bad of both sides. http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/11/22/json-vs-xml/
OK, I'm making the following presumptions.
Your flex application runs on a different machine from the Tomcat
server
Your flex application makes web service calls to the Tomcat server
So, the flex application doesn't know the underlying technology that provides the web services. It's just seeing/consuming the output
There's no reason why the iPad app can't do the same thing. There's no reason why it can't use the same web services that the Flex application uses. It could consume the same messages (Assuming it can handle the request/response format currently employed by the Flex application).
You can make changes if you like if you want to change the structure of the requests/responses between the clients. But the clients don't know (nor care) how the web services are implemented. They are just requesting and consuming info.
I know node.js is usually used to server as a backend to backbone.js, but can netty also do this?
I prefer the jvm, and was hoping someone could provide some production worthy code that serves as a backend to backbone.js.
And the main point of this is to be able to have a real-time web application, so it would use long-polling to maintain a connection with the client to update the UI (say someone updated something via a mobile device, the browser should react to this).
Backbone is 100% backend agnostic.
Our entire site is built on top of Backbone for the front-end and the backend is entirely in Java.
Personal projects have used Python and Flask to handle the API layer.
Backbone was originally culled from a RoR project...
I'm looking for some advice on the simplest way to create some product registration communication. I have a Java desktop application that needs to be re-newed every year. When a user downloads and install this app (through JNLP) they get a limited demo-version. There is code in place on the client to "register" the product and unlock all of the features.
My next step is to build the server-side components. There will be a database with customer ID numbers and other information about the customer. When the user clicks register, some contact information will be sent to the server as well as some product registration ID. The server will check this against the database and then either give the client the o.k. to unlock the features or the user will be informed that the registration id was not valid. This seems like a very standard thing. So what is the standard way to do it?
I have my own VPS and I'm running Tomcat, so I'm really free to implement this any way I choose. I was planning on building some web service, but I have never used REST before.
Use REST; REST is nothing more than using plain HTTP 'better'. Since you are already using HTTP, somehow you are already doing REST like calls and moving these calls to full fledged REST will be easy.
Implementing REST calls is easy. You have two approaches:
Low end: using URLConnection objects on the client, servlets on the server and following some REST conventions on using HTTP methods and 'clean' URLs (see here). Advantage is that you need no 3rd party library and minimize the footprint. Maintenance and evolutions are harder though.
High-end: a framework and specifications like JAX-RS. Using Restlet you can be up in running with a REST server in a couple of hours without having to deploy a servlet container.
Don't use SOAP. The only reason you would want to use SOAP is that you want to contractualise using a WSDL what you are exposing (you can do the same with REST btw, see the Amazon documentation for instance). Trust me, SOAP is way too heavy and confusing for what you are trying to do.
We are seeing Spring in school right now but we don't have the time to wait till the end of the semester to start developing an application. We continue using an app we made last year, and are writing the service layer right now.
The problem is our "client" wants to have a desktop client and a webpart, which used the same dtatabase. This would be no problem if we hook up a server that can handle RMI. So basically we want to be able to retrieve/send data to the server that runs our service layer, and use the objects on the client side as well.
I have no idea where to start digging in Spring to figure out how to do this, so some help would be appreciated.
PS: At this point I do not need MVC yet. MVC is handled from within the desktop app where we have views and controllers.The model is the same from the one on the service layer. How do we use the same model without copying it?
Check out spring remoting: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/remoting.html
It's easy to expose your spring beans remotely, using a variety of protocols.
You might want to take a look at the REST paradigms. With this in mind you could have a web server running your server part of the application and communicating with clients through the HTTP protocol. A simple client could be a webpage in the browser which gets the corresponding HTML pages from the server, or a Swing client which communicates over JSON with the server.
The server can implement different methods for JSON or HTML communication and the server can decide what implementation to use by looking at the Accept Header of the Request objects sent to it, that's what they call Content Negotiation
JSR-311 is implemented as Project Jersey which is a framework for RESTful webservices. You might want to take a look at that.
hope that helped