I have a requirement to read and write bulk of text files at server side.
How can we write using Ajax, Java... Have little bit idea about these technologies but I just need an idea to implement. After that I feel I can proceed. Could you please help me?
Firstly the text files are going to have to be publicly accessible. They cannot exist in a private context on the server, as JavaScript is a client side technology.
Once they are public, you can simply do an AJAX request on the file location, and then parse them as required.
If having them in a public location is going to be a problem, you will need to have a page that serves them to authenticated accounts only, so only people that are logged in can view them. This means they will have to be served via a server side script at some point, which the AJAX request can then fetch as required.
However if you take this approach, you might as well take out the AJAX and just have the server side script do the processing for you and feed out the result.
Related
I'm building my own HTTP server in java, but i'm facing with a problem: I would like to build a page dynamically by creating every HTML object at runtime, the question is: how can i determine the screen dimension of the client's browser?
This information is not present in the HTTP header, so I was thinking about writing a "fake" webpage that runs a javascript that tells the server about the screen (it should redirect to something like www.website.com/w:1920,h:1080) but I don't know anything about cookies (that I suppose are essential to store those informations).
Do you think that I should learn somthng about cookies or there's another way?
BTW I'm not using servlets, just Socket, because that's what I know... should I use servlets?
Thanks for your time!
Matteo
Server knows nothing about client's screen until client send this information. Javascript is easiest way to determine screen size:
window.screen.availHeight
window.screen.availWidth
AJAX request can be used to send the information to the server where it can be stored in session data and backed in database for example if the user is logged in or identified somehow. In such case you don't need cookies. However solution with cookies is easier, check how to set them via javascript. But I'm afraid such solution would be a bit of non-standard, if your site is gonna depend on javascript why not to use it extensively and generate all objects on client side, get that lazy computer working and save your server's resources :) Just feed data by sending simplest HTML containing script doing the work.
Servlets? Can be really light-weight and done with minimal knowledge if you have time go for it.
Requirement is to keep a copy of complete web page at server side same as it is rendered on client browser as past records.These records are revisited.
We are trying to store the html of rendered web page. The html is then rendered using resources like javascript, css and image present at server side. These resources keep on changing. Therefore old records are no longer rendered perfectly.
Is there any other way to solve above? We are also thinking converting it into pdf using IText or apache FOP api but they does not consider javascript effect on page while conversion. Is there any APIs available in java to achieve this?
Till now, no approach working perfectly. Please suggest.
Edit:
In summary,requirement is to create a exact copy of rendered web page at server side to store user activities on that page.
wkhtmltopdf should do this quite nicely for you. It will take a URL, and return a pdf.
code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf
Example:
wkhtmltopdf http://www.google.com google.pdf
Depending on just how sophisticated your javascript is, and depending on how faithfully you want to capture what the client saw, you may be undertaking an impossible task.
At a high level, you have the following options:
Keep a copy of everything you send to the client
Get the client to return back exactly whatever it has rendered
Build your system in such a way that you can actually fetch all historical versions of the constituent resources if/when you need to reproduce a browser's view.
You can do #1 using JSP filters etc, but it doesn't address issues like the javascript fetching dynamic html content during rendering on the client.
Getting the client to return what they are seeing (#2) is tricky, and bandwidth intensive.
So I would opt for #3. In order to turn a website that renders dynamic content versioned, you have to do several things. First, all datasources need to versioned too. So any queries would need to specify the version. "Version" can be a timestamp or some generation counter that you maintain. If you are taking this approach, you would also need to ensure that any javascript you feed to the client does not fetch external resources directly. Rather, it should ask for any resources from your system. Your system would in turn fetch the external content (or reuse from a cache).
The answer would depend on the server technology being used to write the HTML. Are you using Java/JSPs or Servlets or some sort of an HTTPResponse object to push the HTML/data to the browser?
If only the CSS/JS/HTML are changing, why don't you just take snapshots of your client-side codebase and store them as website versions?
If other data is involved (like XML/JSON) take a snapshot of those and version that as well. Then the snapshot of the client codebase as mentioned above with the contemporary snapshot of the data should together give you the exact rendering of your website as at that point of time.
A very resource-consuming requirement but...
You haven't written what application server you are using and what framework. If you're generating responces in your own code, you can just store it while generating.
Another possibility is to write a filter, that would wrap servlet's OutputStream and log everything that was written to it, you must just assure your filter is on the top of the hierarchy.
Another, very powerfull, easiest to manage and generic solution, however possibly the most resource-consuming: write transparent proxy server staying between user and application server, that would redirect each call to app server and return exact response, additionally saving each request and response.
If you're storing the html page, why not the references to the js, css, and images too?
I don't know what your implementation is now, but you should create a filesystem with all of the html pages and resources, and create references to the locations in a db. You should be backing up the resources in the filesystem every time you change them!
I use this implementation for an image archive. When a client passes us the url of an image we want to be able to go back and check out exactly what the image was at that time they sent it (since it's a url it can change at any time). I have a script that will download the image as soon as we receive the url, store it in the filesystem, and then store the path to the file in the db along with other various details. This is similar to what you need, just a couple more rows in your table for the js, css, images paths.
I am looking to develop an app that will take login details from the user, go to a website, login, return values on the web page and then display them to the user on the phone.
Does java have this functionallity? Will I need to use javascript instead maybe? do these answers depend on the website that I am trying to access?
In my head I figure that I could just read in the paramaters as strings or chars, parse the webpage for the appropriate form and "paste" the appropriate value into the form "box". However, I have never attempted anything like this with coding so I am completely new to the idea and dont really know where to start. I tried googling around but any information that I found was either irrelevant or conflicting.
I'm not looking for the code to do it because I will not really learn anythig from that but a finger in the right direction would be great. I really do want to try get better at programming so that's why I've started to give myself these little side projects
Any help that can be offered would be great
Ian,
You can try using http-client (http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/) lib from apache. It lets to pro grammatically access a website (from a Java code). You will need to do the following things
Use the http-client lib to POST the data to the web site.
Receive the html response.
Use some html parser or xpath to retrieve the values from the response html.
You would need a script which accesses the webpage and enters the data, but in my opinion this is illegal. Because you are accessing a secured area and are able to look into sensitive data. Also accessing the page via a script is "botting" - most pages have safety precautions to prevent the execution of scripts, because most of them are harmful.
In my opinion there is no legal and easy solution to this.
I have a webpage that has JavaScript in it. The script contains a method that updates the webpage. I also have a java UDP server. When I get some parameters from a client, I want to call the method in the javascript to update the page.
Is it possible to call methods in Javascript from Java source code? Any pointers?
Thanks!
EDIT: For Ajax, the "request" initiates from the webpage. I want something that can change the webpage by itself - without this request.
A more succinct question would be: Can I dynamically update a webpage from java source file?
In order to reading javascript result you need a browser runtime AFAIK (You cannot get javascript result through a raw socket). You have to include a browser (JTextPane should be able to do it) into your udp server.
DWR is the answer, but it seems dead with no progress for some months. I don't think so you can directly call JavaScript methods from Java without passing an Asynchronous call using Ajax.
I have no idea on how you would dynamically change your content of webpage without an request being passed.
This is what we wanted to do:
-Send co-ordinates from an android phone to a server
-Plot these on a map in a browser window
The complexity was - One 'box' was server for android, and client for google maps. And we needed some glue between these two functionalities.
We initially tried ActiveMQ but could not get it to work.
Due to time constraints, we were forced to explore other approaches... our end result isn't elegant, but it works.
We have a FIFO on the server to which the co-ordinates are written. On the same server, our map page is also hosted. On a button press, XMLHttpRequest is sent to the server. In response, a co-ordinate is dequeued and sent back, which is plotted on the map using google maps api.
I will be happy to share more details/answer questions...
I have a Java program that I'm trying to interact with over the web.
I need to gather form data from the user on a Drupal site that I don't have any control over, send it to the Java program, and send the output back to the user. The Java program needs to load a lot of libraries every time it's run, so it needs to be up waiting for data from the user.
It'd be best for me to just have an HTML form for the input. What's the simplest way to deal with HTML form data using Java?
Also, I'm trying to call the Java program from a shell script. I want the program running in the background though so the libraries are loaded in advance. So ideally, I could use the server I set up for both applications.
Thanks for any help.
It sounds like you really just want to write a servlet (or use a higher level web framework, but a servlet would work fine). That makes it very easy to get web form data - you just ask for values by name, basically.
You could then "script" the application using curl, wget or something similar to make requests to the servlet.
Apologies if this doesn't answer your question - I'm finding it slightly tricky to understand exactly what you're trying to do, particularly as there are multiple layers of web UI involved, as far as I can see.
The easiest way to make POST requests with java is to use the Apache HttpClient or the more recent HttpComponents libraries.