I'm currently working on an analytics webapp with a react frontend and node (express) backend.
Describing the functionality in a nutshell:
A user will be able to login on the website, search for a YouTube username and then the YouTube API is called, the data will be stored in a mysql db via my express API and also the data will be used to calucalte some statistics which afterwards are displayed in a dashboard.
Now I was wondering if I should:
Call the YouTube API from the frontend, i.e. inside my react code, do the calculations display them and and then store it in the DB via my express API.
Or, from the react app call an endpoint in my express API that will then call the YouTube API, store the data in the DB and then pass on the data to my react app.
Are there any best practices or up-/downsides to either approach?
When answering questions like these, it's important to remember that the client-side is different for each and every user that visits your website, their internet speed, their GPU & CPU power, etc., but the server is most commonly held in a stable container and much more powerful than a client.
The proper way would be the following:
1. Obtain a search query from a client
Meaning you should get the user's search query from an input, or any other form of control (text area, checkbox, etc.), this way client is doing the least business logic, as it should. The client should always focus more on UI / UX rather than business logic.
2. Send query to the server
Let the server use the query you've just obtained from client, call the youtube api from the server (either explicitly using Axios, or find a node.js youtube library), and do all the necessary calculation on the backend
3. Send processed data to the client
Let client receive the data in the form which is ready for use (iterations, mappings, etc.) - again separating concerns, server - business logic, client - UI / UX
Now to be fair, the example you have will most commonly be done all on the client-side, since it is not as computationally heavy as other enterprise examples, but this is a good rule to follow for big projects, and no one would really complain if you did it this way, since it would be the proper way.
Related
So i want to develop a simple web application, which will basically be a basic form which on submission will allow to make an external api request. So are there any application designers that can allow to do that with minimalistic code. Appian for example has an interface/application designer that lets you drag and drop a UI interface and build a workflow, make api calls externally or to a database. So like that are there any other apps that allow to do something similar (make api calls/build ui easily/store in databse)? Any other suggestions are also welcome!
It heavily depends on the API as well as the kind of task you´re trying to achieve.
Here´s just a few examples and considerations. (All the below supposes that we´re talking about Web-Based APIs).
If the API requires authentication of some sort and the user authenticates himself: A simple HTTP file with JavaScript to send the request will do the job
If the API requires authentication but you authenticate for all the users: You will need a backend application that does the API request since you need something secure where you can put your Auth-Details for the API. Classic PHP or NodeJS in combination with a served HTTP file for the form itself would work without any JavaScript (depends on the API definitions)
If the API does not require authentication maybe a simple HTML form would work
If you want to write to a database you can have a look at something like https://directus.io/. They allow building a database with a UI and they automatically generate a Web-API which you can then feed by your forms. If the end-user is known to you Directus actually allows users to log in and fill the database with forms that you can visually design but this is rather for employees entering data into an internal database than customers submitting their contact data to you
From my personal experience, all the UI-Tools that promise to integrate with REST APIs make it really hard to do so since every API is different and there is no real standard for them.
Have small app (My first Node js App), where I want add changing real-time content.
For example I have a common url which have list of content link, when user click on particular link it will open its correspondence link.
I have teacher and student role in the app so if teacher open the specific content(From the common url page) then it will automatically open that content for all student who have common url.
Please give me any Idea to implement this functionality and please tell me any plugin who have same functionality for real time content change.
One way, probably the easiest would be to use websockets, an easily manageable choice is socket.io npm package. What makes websockets different from http requests is the direction of the data flow. While http is pull based, meaning that a request has to be made to the server in order to get a response, websockets - once the connection is established - are or at least can be push based, meaning that the server could push out content without having to get a request from the client. In your situation, the teacher and the studens would all have an active websocket connection with the server. When the teacher clicked on a certain view, it would push the view’s data requirements to the students without any interaction from their side and the view would update on their screens according to the pushed data.
Look into how websockets work and try to experiment with a basic socket.io setup.
I'm new at Firebase, I'm starting making a project which has to include Firebase and angular2, but I am such confused about how to implement them. I don't know if a there's the need to have a Back-end implementation (like Java or NodeJs) to handle some security issues (like form validation, authentication, routing etc), or it's enough just implementing Angular2 to handle all these issues. I would be so Thankful about any helpful advice how I could implement these both technologies to build my project successfully. Thanks
first firebase is something like your backend firebase can safe get and send request as your backend apps...
and angular js will do the rest like you just said andd all the backend stuff you can handle by firebase :)
This is my simple explanation on how this 2 works together
Always keep in mind that Angular works only in front-end. Its domain is the look and feel, application events, sending data to server and anything else that has something to do with displaying data is coded in this area.
Backend services in the other hand interacts with your database, creating business logic, handling authentications, saving / sending of data and other stuff that interacts with the database is coded from here.
Now how these two interact is done by the frontend service to send HTTP requests to the Server which is the backend service. This is done by using Angulars $http service or the so called jQuery AJAX or the infamous XMLHttpRequest JavaScript native. New technologies today utilizes Web Sockets which is being used by Firebase and some other frameworks, Web Sockets offers a faster way sending / fetching data from server.
The server then interprets the data being sent and send appropriate response. For example getting user list, saving profile, getting reports, logging in, etc.. It would work in this workflow.
1) Angular sends http request to server to get list of users.
2) Backend service installed in the server then interprets the data being sent.
3) Backend service then gets list of users from the database.
4) Backend then sends the data back to the frontend service.
5) Frontend then recieves server response and displays the data to the view.
Also these two is coded separately. To have more detailed explations research about how frontend and backend services interact you can find so much resouces in Google.
I read in an article that odata can be used for different combination of clients/servers.
Say I would like to develop a web application where i store data(say information about all mobile products on market) using mongoDB and use python as backend with Bottle framework to access data through browser as GET.
Then i decide to extend web app as android app. i can extend it to android without any code change on server side.
My doubt is does using odata here helps in any way? Say if i want to extend it to other clients?
Yes, you are right, you don't need to change even a single line of code on the server side if you change a client app. OData defines many conventions for the communications between the client and the server. such as:
What the URL looks like if you want to query some data
http://services.odata.org/V4/OData/OData.svc/Products?$filter=ID gt 2&$select=ID,Name,Rating,Price&$orderby=Price desc
Which http method should be used to Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete an entity
Generally speaking, Post for Create, Get for Retrieve, Patch/Put for Update, Delete for Delete.
What the payload looks like.
How to invoke a function/action
As long as the requests conform to these conventions, the server side always returns the predictable responsese regardless whether the clients is a browser or a mobile device.
I also find the examples for the odata:
https://aspnet.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Samples/WebApi/OData/v4/ .
Hope this helps you.
I have a small Node.js HTTP server that does requests to a mongo database (with the mongoose module).
What I want to do is query the database, store it in a variable (array) and send it to the client.
Because ideally, when the user clicks on one of the buttons on the html page, the JavaScript will pick-up the event and change the appearance of the website by showing calculations based on data that is stored in the database.
The only way I could come with was just "transferring" the database content to the client browser but if anyone can come with another solution that would be fine too !
So basically my question is :
How can I pass a variable from the Node.js server to the client browser when serving a page ?
Thank you in advance !
If you will be doing more than a couple of these types of transfers, I recommend looking into Socket.IO.
It's a layer that provides quick and easy communication between Node.js servers and web front-ends, by abstracting web sockets when available, and falling back to other transports (such as JSON-P or Flash) when it's not available. Basically, you would call io.emit('something', {yourdata: here}), and it is easily received on the other end. All of the serialization is done for you.
http://socket.io/
Give their demo a shot to see how it works.