Are there any standard architectures employed when building iOS/Android applications that require server-side functionality? For example, if an iOS app. needs to fetch a list of books from the server side, what/how does it do it? Does it use webservices? Does it use RPCs? What infrastructure is generally preferred for such applications? I've read about ways to encode data structures and objects using things like Protocol buffers and Thrift but nothing about an overall architecture that just lets me code my client-side and server-side logic. Will a simple spring/hibernate web-app work?
I hope the question makes sense and is a valid one.
Thank you
For Android, Google have started to produce tooling around integration with AppEngine using RPC. This Google IO video runs through the new tooling, or the highlights can be found on this blog post.
Related
I am new to mobile application development and wanted to know from experts here on how they approach the server-side design. I need to support cross platform clients (iOS, Android, Windows) and require a scalable backend architecture.
What are the widely deployed server-side strategies
Are there any Mobile specific open source server-side technologies available.
What factors people consider for mobile application back-end.
I agree with half the answer above. You should use REST architecture - it is the most straightforward way to go. I use Ruby on Rails for my mobile projects. It is quick to start building the server code and see it working in somewhere like heroku.com almost instantly.
So I'd pick the following:
ruby on rails - worth your time picking up
heroku.com for deploying / or EC2 if you pick the Rubber gem
Google App Engine is another great option if you know some python / java
REST architecture
store all your heavy images etc with Amazon S3. They have some great SDKs to work with.
get yourself some JSON libraries to communicate with your server
on iOS:
use MKNetwokKit (it will save you lots of trouble down the road. it helps you cache and its a nice architecture all around).
if the app is small, try a data model based on NSArchiver instead of CoreData (SLOWWW). Mogenerator is a good start (this isn't server related..)
If you hate writing server side, I'd advice you to checkout Parse.com. Completely mobile only development with all server code handled for you. For big projects, you really should write your own server stuff.
Some extra things I'd consider:
how would the security work? just a session token in the HTTP header?
tier your app -- networking / MVC
what happens when you're offline? - this is currently something we're dealing with after not having thought early - pain.
I've had good success with creating a server using REST web services and XML data, but would recommend JSON instead. You can create this using Java and host it using Tomcat. This is widely deployed and widely consumable by multiple mobile and even non-mobile technologies.
A couple of factors to consider:
* You'll probably want it in a DMZ and being Internet accessible so think about firewalls, reverse proxies, and encryption via SSL.
* Will you host the server or sell the server to customers? Hosting is easy. If selling, there are many more considerations.
I could need your experience according server implementations for the currently evolving Websockets in HTML5. We want to use this technology for a project using common webbrowsers on the client site. What we now need is a webserver that feeds our requirements. These are:
written in Java or PHP since these are the languages which currently are used and mastered by all the programmers in the project. Since it seems that there are no promising PHP implementations yet, I tend to concentrate on the Java site.
as fast as possible. We don't expect too heavy usage in production but we need to be able to synch two browsers on independent host in nearly real-time.
easy expandable. We will need to implement our own protocol on top of the websockets so we would like the most possible flexibility.
easy to use, well documented and actively developed. Since we have to come to a first running implementation rather quickly and since I expect some changes in the developing people during the time, it would be great if it's not to hard to get into the server programming.
I already had a look on some servers/frameworks which look promising, e.g. Jetty, Netty and jWebSocket. I also found some older discussions of this topic. However, I would be glad about some current experiences or recommendations of those of you who already have used Java (or PHP) to work with Websockets. Is there some implementation which is especially well-fitting or one that we absolutely shouldn't use?
Edit:
For clarity: When I speak of implementing our own protocol on top of Websockets I mean having some kind of plugin mechanism so that we can use a Websocket to send XML-messages to the server and then use a plugin to interpret them into some server actions as we like. I guess every server implementation also supports this but it would be good if it was not too difficult to write such plugins.
I don't have any experience with PHP so I'll give you my opinion for the Java (and python side).
For Java:
You have your very common and safe choice of Tomcat. It's one of the most actively developed servers, its open source, lots of support/help from its very large community, from what I've read (but not tested) it can be fairly scalable and it also has a very mature console to monitor different metrics for your website.
You also have other choices such as Caucho's Resin, who have a very small yet smart team who actively develop their webserver. Their new heartbeat service allows a good degree of scalability (again from what I've read).
And then you also have Google's appengine which is all about scalability. Their API (for both, the server and client side) has started to focus on realtime web applications so it's a bit easier to for creating high performance web applications without having to worry about the server related optimization that you often have to make with other servers. They have APIs for creating "channels" between the server and client side for very realtime applications. The AppEngine team also has a new MapReduce API for analyzing data quickly/efficiently. For these reasons and the personal opinion that they are pioneering new web technologies/standards, I'm personally been leaning towards AppEngine. It's free if you're keeping cpu/data usuage low but if you need full scale deployment it does start to get pricey so do research. If your project is more for fun/school, its free quotas are enough and all its development tools/APIs are free so it's perfect.
For Python:
I'm more Java than Python, but Python is definitely a great language and very very very easy to learn. And the reason I'm recommending Python for consideration here is because AppEngine also allows developers the choice of Python. The author/creater of the Python language is now on the AppEngine team so, even though the Python and Java APIs are pretty much exactly the same, they sometimes have new/better APIs for Python. For example, I think the datastore API offered with Python is a bit easier and optimized for the Google datastore. Also, since you'd be using python, you can use Django with AppEngine.
The second choice that I've recently become aware of is the tornado web server which was developed by FriendFeed and then bought and used by Facebook. It's also actively developed. But the reason I bring this up is that Tornado's focus, much like AppEngine's, is high web application performance and scalability. I have no experience with it but I've become interested in its technology simply because no one can contest that Facebook requires a very high performance/scalable web server.
Some last thoughts:
In general you'll find that it isn't very difficult to build your own protocol on top of the APIs provided from most web servers (even Asp.NET MVC). But from what I've been able to test around with AppEngine, it really focuses on being flexible on what kind of protocol is build on top of it. To me, its pretty much just feels like a RPC server which which works on top of HTTP. And that becomes even more apparent if you use Python just because of some of the language constructs.
Where, when and why did you use ESB in a PHP-project?
Where, when and why do you think that it would make sense to use ESB in a PHP-project?
Does ESB (and ESB-facilitators like Mule) do provide any capability PHP and native LAMP-technologies are lacking?
Edit
My motivation for this question is stemming from my assumption that you actually never really need Mule. Mule will facilitate communication with external services which you could handle without mule. At the end of the day also Mule will create costs and overhead. So my question is steering at having somebody tell me about scenarios where you really benefit of ESB and tools like Mule or to second my guess with solid knowledge.
Edit 2
regarding Houcem's reply to my comment to his post ... what would be a native LAMP-answer to ESB/Mule?
Edit 3
Seems like Tuxedo might be a more PHP-native alternative to Mule/ESB. Somebody got experience using this tool?
ESB could be used in different ways :
Providing asynchronous processing : Example : If you have a web site that does a lot of emailing .. and sending an email takes a lot of time which may block the execution of your page : you may use an ESB to send the email data to Mule and route it to an Email outbound channel, this way you can say that you have implemented a mail message queue. Another form of asynchronous processing : using mule to execute php scripts (using command line) in a non blocking way.
Integration with java applications : You can send Messages to mule using php and implement some java business using mule API in java, php messages will be received by your java business components. This is used in big web sites which does a lot of complex processing and need flexible and powerful language like java.
What you need to know : ESB should be used like a Bus which means collecting data from heterogenous environments in a standard form (Mule messages) .. do business logic and then output data (after routing) to different environment
There is no native php integration with Mule in PHP world. To do it you should use web services (SOAP)
An ESB is a general solution to a scalability problem; a problem in managing the overhead, cost and complexity of a large number of application interfaces. I wrote a short article about the rationale for ESB/EAI solutions at http://psicom.com.au/solutions/eai
Admittedly, most PHP sites are small scale and would usually find it difficult to justify the administrative and technological overhead of an ESB. But it is now quite feasible to meet all of a business's application needs with OSS PHP products, and there is also increasing cost pressure on organisations, so I expect there will be increasing numbers of PHP shops that will start to feel the kinds of growing pains that I wrote about. This may make them re-evaluate their application integration issues, and an ESB is a good solution to that problem.
As far as I know there are no ESB products developed in PHP, and I don't expect to see this in the near future. But FWIW, many ESB products provide bindings for PHP and other OSS platforms, so the platform that the ESB runs on isn't crucial.
The ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is a kind of backbone for the integration of the several heterogeneous applications of the enterprise, that may originate from different vendors, technologies, and even be redundant.
The fact it seems more linked to Java world than PHP or any other language is that usually big companies information systems are made of :
Mix of opensource development and software editors tools (including ERPs). Development are often made using Java EE in order to rely on Java EE stacks (and its vendors IBM, Oracle, ...)
Full Microsoft (no need of ESB, Microsoft provide EAI/ESB like tools)
PHP is most used for web application (even for big companies, but web oriented).
An ESB is a big cost, and is only usefull/needed when the number of interconnected application is raising.
When you have only few connections (between Java, PHP or whatever), you can handle it at a network level, using DNS, and at application level using configuration keys and performing protocol exchanges and small business integration for each point to point connection.
A potential use case for a PHP application would be an internet site of a travel agency quering multiple flight/train/hotels companies. And even in a such case, it won't be mad to develop a full cross quering system since it is the core of the business for such a site/company.
I would recommend Windows Azure Service Bus, which provides a PHP SDK here
https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-php
service bus is great but maintaining one is not. Windows Azure Service Bus solved all the maintenance overhead for you, and it is PHP compatible. You can even communicate with apps that are written in Java, C#, VS C++ from PHP easily.
I was looking for some opinions on the best remote method invocation practices when developing iPhone applications that communicate with Java (java EE) servers.
Many iphone applications these days typically talk to a server back end. I typically prefer to write my servers in java using some Spring libraries. So far I have not found or stuck to a definitive practice for iphone->java server communication.
What are some technical solutions and libraries that you have used to implement this kind of client-server communication?
One thing I always keep in mind is that I want the communication protocols to be simple so that multiple platforms can be added for example, in future adding Android and possibly Blackberry clients, that can use the same protocol to talk to the server.
I'd go with JSON. If you want to use Spring, go with restful webservices. Do some googling on "webservices restful spring json" (without the quotes) and you'll get some pointers.
JSON will suit you fine with other languages as well. I've written an iPhone application that uses JSON, and that was quite easy with the use of
http://code.google.com/p/json-framework. I'm pretty sure that both Android and Blackberry should be capable of reading JSON just fine as well.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I have put this iPhone application under an MIT license and you can browse the code on google code:
http://code.google.com/p/accountadmin/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fiphone%2FFrittRegnskap%2FClasses
I'm currently doing this for work as well. Our backend is Java EE (with Spring) and then of course the front end is iOS. We use JSON as the payload format, as Knubo suggested. All of our web services are also RESTful to make dealing with URL construction and authentication on the phone easier.
I would highly recommend you check out RestKit, which is a pretty comprehensive framework that allows you to easily integrate your RESTful, JSON-based web services with CoreData. We also use YAJL for parsing JSON manually in the rare cases where that is necessary.
Thus far, that tooling has made it a breeze to work with our web services.
http://code.google.com/p/json-framework is really useful.
We are occasionally in a position to take over PHP based projects, but as we are a Java-house we are searching for ways to turn a PHP-project (or codebase) into a Java-project.
The approaches we came up to work in a mixed Java/PHP context are :
PHP in frontend and Java in backend with separate front (PHP+JavaScript) and back (Java+SQL) teams
using both technologies in a Java webapp, for example via Quercus with one or multiple teams
migrating everything to Java
We haven't tried any of these approaches as we've been lucky enough to have enough Java-only projects to work on.
Do you see other approaches, or have you tried any of the described approaches?
I've used Quercus. I think that if it supports something like Drupal then it's probably fairly mature. If your PHP app works out of the box, then it offers you a very gradual upgrade path to Java since you can write your own plugins in Java and expose them to the PHP layer, such as using a JDBC back-end.
How easy it is all depends on how well separated the layers are in the PHP application. For example, if the view layer is well separated, you might be able to replace both controller and model logic with a Spring MVC application that uses a 'QuercusView' for the view - you may be able to re-use a lot of the PHP view logic.
You should also consider how you can make a survey of the PHP code - maybe a script that extracts all the function calls, imports etc. so you can quickly test the Quercus support for them.
Sorry, I haven't used the PHP-Java bridge, but I think the Quercus library is pretty mature these days, so that would be my first choice for a staged migration.
My experiences with Querces are not so good. Maybe it has improved, but when I tried it something like two years ago (a long time, I know) it was far from complete and did not support all functions yet. Also, if your application is using some extensions (e.g. from PECL) you will experience difficulties getting this up and running under Querces.
We're currently in the process of migrating a web application from PHP to Java. We're designing a SOA and we'll probably replace some data access objects in the PHP application with a version that talks to internal webservices. Currently we're using Thrift as protocol for our internal webservices, a framework that also has a client available for PHP. We expect this to increase flexibility during migration (allowing us to do step-by-step migration, rather than all-at-once)
PHP/Java Bridge may be of your interest:
The PHP/Java Bridge is an
implementation of a streaming,
XML-based network protocol, which can
be used to connect a native script
engine, for example PHP, Scheme or
Python, with a Java virtual machine.
It is up to 50 times faster than local
RPC via SOAP, requires less resources
on the web-server side. It is faster
and more reliable than direct
communication via the Java Native
Interface, and it requires no
additional components to invoke Java
procedures from PHP or PHP procedures
from Java.
NUMITON may be useful for you:
http://java.dzone.com/announcements/automated-translations-php-jav
The shortest route from PHP to Java
Numiton offers an automated alternative to migrating PHP codebase. This way,
established applications can benefit from the advantages offered by Java in its
enterprise-level capacity.
Some of the risks inherent to any software migration are avoided by using an automated
translation tool. Our PHPtoJava product performs variable type inference,
objectualization and other operations in a uniform manner, the resulting appearance and
behavior being identical to what the users already know.
Of course, the human factor still plays an important role in the post-translation
phases: application fine-tuning and functional testing. The speed and accuracy of the
entire process surpass however those of a manual translation.
One of the applications we have migrated this way is the well-known forum engine
phpBB. The translation result, nBB2, powers our own forum and was recently donated to the
open-source community as a SourceForge project.
PHP in frontend and Java in backend
with separate front (PHP+JavaScript)
and back (Java+SQL) teams
This is technically feasible using SOAP.
using both technologies in a Java
webapp, for example via Quercus with
one or multiple teams
I have no idea about this
migrating everything to Java
This is better option, but it will take time depending on the size & complexity of your project.
I do not have any experience running PHP inside a JVM, but I am betting that IBM does. :)
You might consider Project Zero.
http://www.projectzero.org/php/
Seems similar to Querces or that other thing someone linked. The only other thing that you didn't mention that I can think of is to refactor the PHP code because I'm assuming that its an older codebase written in a PHP 4 manner.
I know this is 2 years old question but i still want to contribute. We are migrating from full java portal to php+java. We have 14 million users. This design doesn't need web services because we use java as json provider for php and js. We will see the result soon...
PHP in frontend and Java in backend with separate front
(PHP+JavaScript) and back (Java+SQL) teams