Google provided the latest Api "Popular times" to get data regarding to the specific time a particular business or else is busy or popular. However it comes with python implementation.
Does anyone know a way to use the google popular times api inside a Node.js project?
https://github.com/m-wrzr/populartimes
this link gets you for a python code..how to include or how we can get api for node project
You could try the foot traffic API service BestTime.app, which also works with Node.JS. Unfortunately, it's paid, but they offer a free test account.
BestTime.app provides foot traffic data almost similar to Google Popular Times and Foursquare data, but with more functionality. You can also analyze and filter foot traffic data of multiple places in an area. So you can for example filter places and show only bars that are busy on Friday evening, or show only supermarkets that are quiet on Sunday morning.
You can view the data through their website tools (e.g. on a heatmap), or get the same data through their software API (Software API tutorial).
Integrating the API is really useful if you want to e.g. make consumer-focused apps/websites to inform people to which place they should and at what time.
In the picture above the BestTime.app Radar tool shows foot traffic data for popular attractions in New York City. On the left the a foot traffic prediction is shown for the whole day. The map is overlayed with a heatmap that indicates the predicted foot traffic intensity for current hour per place. Using the filters, in the right panel, you can narrow down your search by selecting for example only the quiet NYC attractions on Friday afternoon.
Disclosure: I work for BestTime.app
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I have 100,000+ addresses that need to be geocoded, but most geocoding services seem to cost money after the first couple thousand entries. Is there any free service that can geocode what I need either in one go or in a relatively short amount of time i.e. a couple weeks at most while being free or relatively cheap?
Also, I may have access to arcgis and I'm wondering if arcgis's geocoding service have a limit if you have the premium version.
The answer is No, there are no free services that will handle 100,000+ entries.
Although it can be argued that one can write a script that will handle geocoding actions in sequence and parallel, i.e. Google's geocoding API with 100 instances running at 2500/day. It is unrealistic and violates their Terms of Service.
To my knowledge, ArcGIS also has a limit as well.
Your best bet is that if this is company or business related, have them foot the bill.
I was trying to develop an application, assume that it should list all public events/gatherings happening in Bangalore. For example all food festivals happening in bangalore in next 1 month or a mass movement like marathon race happening in next 4 months. But these details are available in different sites across the web.
Say, suppose I google for "Marathon races in bangalore". Events happening in Bangalore will be listed but the dteails will be in different websites. May be the Marathon organizers have websites of their own or they had put ads in some other websites. I want to get these details from the web. Is there something like a web query or any idea of how to get this data?
I did something like this for my town a long time ago, the short answer is no. The way I implemented it was to contact a bunch of local bars and ask them what their entertainment was for the weekend and then added it my self. After a while They got used to me and I added a feature to have them update the information.
If you find a site that displays events you could do a screen scrape for the information, but it is delicate, if they change the site your application breaks.
I am developing a website (basically a public facing site).
How can I simulate multiple users are surfing my site and doing various activities so that I can understand how my site will behave in a real time environment?
I am using Apache server and PHP.
As mentioned in previous posts, you will need a load test tool. The good news is that there are many tools and services in this field: open source load test ones like JMeter and Gatling, commercial one like Loadrunner and Neoload, the bad news is that you have to answer some questions and make some decisions.
One key decision you need to make is whether to test your application in the lab or in the cloud.
cloud based testing: Blazemeter, soasta, neustar ...
in-lab testing: JMeter, Gatling, Neoload, loadrunner, webperformer ....
In addition, you need to answer the following questioins:
how many virtual clients you want to emulate to stress the server
how much budget do you have
how complex is the web application
how much skills do the tester(s) have.
If you have high budget, complex web application and testers with good skills (like a developer), you can consider Loadrunner, NeoLoad.
If you have low budget but your tester(s) have good skills, you can consider Jmeter and Gating.
If you need to emulate lots of virtual clients (say 10000) to stress your complex web site and your tester(s) don't have the skill of a developer/programer, you may want to consider NetGend. There is a blog site where you can find out how complex performance testing can be (like filling HTML forms, extract values from JSON messages etc) and how easy it is on NetGend platform. By the way, you don't need high budget for NetGend.
Good lucky in your load/performance testing!
What you want is a load testing tool, there are several but id check out Neoload. You could also use Selenium and the various way to run selenium tests automatically
As this is your first time engaging in this task you would be well advised to find someone who has been there, done that and developed the battle scars from this activity. It is not a trivial effort to performance test a piece of software. If you listen to the traditional software vendors they will tell you that "any business analyst can use this tool and be effective" as if the tool is 85-95% of the skills you will need to be able to successfully performance test an application or a site. This is marketing foo to remove barriers to a sale.
In actuality the tool you select is anywhere from 5-15% of the total skill set you will need to be successful. Also, if the financial risk of failure is sufficiently high to warrant a performance test then it almost matters not which tool you pick, for the cost of the tool and the expertise will be dwarfed by your financial risk of not scaling.
If you don't have time to develop the skills or enough lead time to get a solid performance tester then you may want to consider some of the managed services offerings in the market, such as SOASTA, which can provide the expertise and the tool bundled within the deal. Here are some things you will want to look at in advance of any test (common issues)
Load Balancer misconfiguration resulting in distorted load to one node
Not appropriately managing your cache age for your static resources (.jpg, .css, ...) resulting in higher than expected load
All of your lookup queries to the database should be index optimized. Use a database profiler to check this
Holding onto resources too long. If your 95th percentile page to page request delay is five minutes then don't set your timeout at 30 minutes or 90 minutes for the HTTP session. This will hold onto resources far too long for the dead session. I use a rule of thumb of 95th percentile value times 1.5.
if this is a shopping site then don't hand out a default cart to everyone who shows up. Make sure they are on the revenue path before you hand them a cart, such as looking at the cart or placing something in the cart. Otherwise you have just built a 1:1 relationship with every customer and just about every piece of your architecture from web server to app server to the database server where the cart is created and managed
Also on the cart front, implement a 100x100 rule. If someone has a 100 items in the cart pick up the phone and call them to personalize the sale. If you have persistent carts which never expire then consider implementing a 100 day rule for evacuating from the cart items of that age or killing a cart altogether which hasn't been touched in that period. These people are clearly not on the revenue path.
Consider your design for ecommerce. Every step between add to cart and checkout is an opportunity to abandon the sale. The fewer the steps the greater the conversion rate: This is the genius behind the Amazon one click checkout. Minimize your number of steps and you will see a higher revenue flow as a result.
I would recommend gatling for load testings. It's scala based but a recorder is provided to generate workload test cases.
=> http://gatling-tool.org/
It's important to set some dimensions for test tool assessment to simulate user traffic:
SLA details (performance goals such as pages per second (PPS), http request per second (HPS), throughput, CPU usage etc.)
Virtual user size to simulate (You will need this info to decide number of
slave PCs/VMs, in other words that's called load generators, according to virtual user number
range)
Maintenance cost of scripts over changes
Effort to develop and execute test scripts
Number of test scenarios
Scheduling needs (You may want to schedule tool in regular basis or
execute test on-demand if needed)
Budget for test tool licenses and ROI (return of investment) calculations (Price, tool
expertise cost, utilizaton of test tool on other web applications etc)
Metrics provided by test tools
Monitoring requirements of network, servers and client
Integration with current test infrastructure (If HP ALM exist, you may be interested in Loadrunner)
If you are in hurry and don't have time to evaluate which tool to select, you may start with JMeter.
Selenium can be used for test automation of regression tests, I would like to highlight it's not effective for performance test due to its API. Sahi is another option for test automation.
I think that you are definitely looking for a load testing tool like Blazemeter. I recently discover this webinar which shows you how to do load testing on your application using a PaaS provider as a development and runtime environment, where you can deploy your application to run the load tests. They combine Blazemeter with a monitoring tool, New Relic in this case, to see the way in which you detect the new users surfing on your website. It is really cool and very interesting since you can know what is the performance of your application with a specific infrastructure.
Simple.
Set up server / application monitoring - New Relic is the easiest and most powerful. Free for 14 days.
Record a typical user's activity - Use JMeter to set up a proxy on your laptop and route web requests, mobile app usage etc through it. Sounds difficult but it's really easy. JMeter can act as the man-in-the-middle and capture all the requests sent by the browser/app to the server(s).
Now you "clone" the above user as many times as you need/could and blast the server. Initially you'd run the load test from your dev machine. Mine can take up to 80 concurrent users before cpu/ram runs out. Beyond this level explore BlazeMeter (free 50 concurrent users), jmeter-ec2 script (free), flood.io etc. Upload your script and blast away at your server. Ideally you should run incremental stress tests at your server. 10 users, 50 users, 100 users, 200 users etc.
Analyse, fix issues & ramp up the stress - In between each stress blast, go over your new relic. How is the application & server performing? What's failing? How are the alerts working?
If you are also searching for UI-Testing, you should check out Sahi Pro 6 automated testing tool, it also can be integrated with Jenkins.
==> http://sahipro.com/
It is really easy to record user actions with it on any browser and just playback the recorded scripts.
You can run scripts simultaneously on multiple browsers, thus simulate multiple users browsing your page:
https://sahipro.com/docs/using-sahi/playback-desktop.html#Distributed%20Runs%20-%20More%20Information
I'm brand new to Dynamics CRM and have been asked to see if this is a viable replacement for the employee tracking software we're using now (AlexSys Team 2 Pro). We're not so much of a sales based company as the tutorials i see for CRM focus on. I know CRM is more for customer relations and sales tracking but i also know it's highly customizable and can do what i need it to do. I need something that keeps track of how many new tasks have been created and how many have been done and to show a graph or a report with the results. I've looked at some PluralSight videos and some windows videos but they all seem to focus on and really push the use of its sales side usability. We do sell our product here (i work at a software development company) but we need something that isn't focused on sales and is usable to management for tracking progress. So for example, lets say im aksed to do 4 things(tasks), I do 2 of those things and am in the process of handling my 3rd. I'm not a sales agent, lets say im a programmer, I need CRM to be able to show my manager that I had 4 new tasks, completed 2, and if possible to show that im in the process of working on the 3rd. AlexSys Team gives you different options for what state the task is in, such as In-Process and Completed but it does poorly when it comes to reporting. Are there any good places to learn how to do that in CRM, we are not using a partner and will not have someone coding this or changing this for us, i will possibly be the one working on that so i need something that can help show me how to customize it without constantly talking about sales. Im off to watch more PluralSight videos but maybe a user here knows of somewhere better to learn from or maybe just a specific PluralSight video i may have missed. Thanks for any input.
Dynamics CRM is as you've discovered very customisable and will almost certainly meet the requirements you've described. Whether it is the correct choice only you can decide.
YouTube is a really good resource for CRM videos, you can also take a look at the CRM 2011 Technical Training Videos on Channel 9 produced when the product was first released. These give a high level overview of CRM 2011 technical capabilities.
You may want to look at the basics of Activities ( in particular Tasks ) and Queues. Make sure you're clear on the usage of Status and Status Reason and how you can customise them. For reporting you can either use the built-in dashboard capabilities or create your own SSRS reports using BIDS that can be hosted within CRM. The process of producing these reports whilst subtlety different will be easily understood by anyone with some some basic SSRS skills.
I'd recommend enlisting the help of a partner in the first instance even if it's to just verify your initial design. The overall cost of their time in relation to the install and running costs of CRM won't be too significant and they may even be able to save you some money.
I'm not sure of a better place for videos, but I can speak to CRM's ability to serve as a rapid application development platform and the areas it excels. It allows you to create new fields and entities (think Database Tables) without touching a database, as well as customize forms, roles, and security with 0 code. You can also sign up for a free months trial online to setup a quick Proof of Concept.
There is so much that it can do, and do quickly, that your company may be better served to seek outside help, resulting in a better product, delivered quicker, with less overall costs than trying to do everything "in-house".
I am interested in software alternatives to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) for use in a (large) university context. Has anyone experiences of migrating from GSA to an alternative solution? If so, what were the reasons for doing this (technical, financial, staff effort, etc) and have the experiences been positive?
I would recommend looking up Apache Solr , it is IMHO the best scalable, feature-rich search server out there. A F/OSS out-of-the-box solution from Apache Software Foundation and used by organizations such as Netflix, AOL, CNet etc. We had used GSA in our company for an year before moving to Solr. The move was relatively painless compared to the benefits accrued.
Since it integrates with a RESTful interface it can be integrated into your platform of choice without language/platform tie-ins. Give it a whirl!
We are currently moving from Google (GSA) to Microsoft FAST (specifically FSIS).
The reason is simple, we are not satisified with the Google experiance from a supportablity and manageability perspective. We have chossen FAST because it gives us a platform that can scale as our needs grow over the next few years. Also it gives us a very fine level of control. What I mean is it will give us the ability to define custom fields and then control how these fields are populated.
The company I work for is a Google GSA partner and has developed a solution on top of the GSA. We also have a cloud solution with very similar benefits to the GSA and a host of things that the GSA can't do - like scale geographically, scale with load, upload data and have it in the index in near real-time, have nested records, deal with hierarchy etc...
In our experience, the people who migrated from the GSA to the Cloud solution did so for the following reasons.
Primarily, they did not want to manage hardware.
Most of our customers are ecommerce / media companies, and they had a lot of navigation. The GSA search throughput really struggles when you have a lot of navigations / refinements. For example if you have 20 navigations, the throughput drops from around 50 queries per second to about 12.
Indexing time - the GSA has a minimum of 7 minutes for something to show up in the index, and for ecomm / media these times are unacceptable.
GroupBy has written migration tools to allow the smooth transition from GSA --> Cloud and also the cloud platform accepts the same format that the GSA accepts.
Have the experiences been positive? Well, clearly I'm going to be biased and say yes, but there are hard conversion increases that support the clients positivity. :-)
More details at: www.groupbyinc.com