What I Heard :
WebHooks : They are just HTTP POST and not a new protocol or any new Technology . Let me put it in an example. Lets say we want to watch a directory for any changes and ping the user whenever anything is changed. I write a C# code watching the directory for changes and when something happens, I do an HTTP POST to let the user know something is changed and it might interest you.
Azure Functions: The best way i can explain you is hosting bits and pieces of reusable code online and hitting them via HTTP call whenever needed and not worrying about infrastructure or any supporting platform.
What I want to know:
Why is the name WebHook making so much noise , i mean its very clear and straight forward programming that you do to tell your users that something happened via some API calls or event listeners.
Can someone please make me understand these Terminologies if I got them in a wrong way and also some examples might help me along with your explanation.
Related
Bots are amazing, unless you're Google Analytics
After many months of learning to host my own Discord bot, I finally figured it out! I now have a node server running on my localhost that sends and receives data from my Discord server; it works great. I can do all kinds of the things I want to with my Discord bot.
Given that I work with analytics everyday, one project I want to figure out is how to send data to Google Analytics (specifically GA4) from this node server.
NOTE: I have had success in sending data to my Universal Analytics property. However, as awesome as that was to finally see pageviews coming into, it was equally heartbreaking to recall that Google will be getting rid of Universal Analytics in July of this year.
I have tried the following options:
GET/POST requests to the collect endpoint
This option presented itself as impossible from the get-go. In order to send a request to the collection endpoint, a client_id must be sent along with the request itself. And this client_id is something that must be generated using Google's client id algorithm. So, I can't just make one up.
If you consider this option possible, please let me know why.
Install googleapis npm package
At first, I thought I could just install the googleapis package and be ready to go, but that idea fell on its face immediately too. With this package, I can't send data to GA, I can only read with it.
Find and install a GTM npm package
There are GTM npm packages out there, but I quickly found out that they all require there to be a window object, which is something my node server would not have because it isn't a browser.
How I did this for Universal Analytics
My biggest goal is to do this without using Python, Java, C++ or any other low level languages. Because, that route would require me to learn new languages. Surely it's possible with NodeJS alone... no?
I eventually stumbled upon the idea of actually hosting a webpage as some sort of pseudo-proxy that would send data from the page to GA when accessed by something like a page scraper. It was simple. I created an HTML file that has Google Tag Manager installed on it, and all I had to do was use the puppeteer npm package.
It isn't perfect, but it works and I can use Google Tag Manager to handle and manipulate input, which is wonderful.
Unfortunately, this same method will not work for GA4 because GA4 automatically excludes all identified bot traffic automatically, and there is no way to turn that setting off. It is a very useful feature for GA4, giving it quite a bit more integrity than UA, and I'm not trying to get around that fact, but it is now the Bane of my entire goal.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9888366?hl=en
Where to go from here?
I'm nearly at the end of my wits on figuring this one out. So, either an npm package exists out there that I haven't found yet, or this is a futile project.
Does anyone have any experience in sending data from NodeJS to GA4? (or even GTM?) How did you do it?
...and this client_id is something that must be generated using Google's client id algorithm. So, I can't just make one up...
Why, of course you can. GA4 generates it pretty much the same as UA does. You don't need anything from google to do it.
Besides, instead of mimicking just requests to the collect endpoint, you may just wanna go the MP route right away: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4 The links #dockeryZ gave, work perfectly fine. Maybe try opening them in incognito, or in a different browser? Maybe you have a plugin blocking analytics urls.
Moreover, you don't really need to reinvent the bicycle. Node already has a few packages to send events to GA4, here's one looking good: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ga4-mp?activeTab=readme
Or you can just use gtag directly to send events. I see a lot of people doing it even on the front-end: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ga-gtag Gtag has a whole api not described in there. Here's more on gtag: https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/gtagjs/reference Note how the library allows you to set the client id there.
The only caveat there is that you'll have to track client ids and session ids manually. Shouldn't be too bad though. Oh, and you will have to redefine the concept of a pageview, I guess. Well, the obvious one is whenever people post in the chan that is different from the previous post in a session. Still, this will have to be defined in the code.
Don't worry about google's bot traffic detection. It's really primitive. Just make sure your useragent doesn't scream "bot" in it. Make something better up.
I am new for action for Google, and I want a help. I want to create a chatbot and wanna use actions on Google API for this, I came across certain blogs but I can not understand how to setup this thing and local and make use of actions on Google API's in a productive way. I have read the documentation but nothing seems to be work in a desired manner. Please help me with initial steps where I could begin with.
I think you should read the documents properly. Here's the correct address for developing actions :- https://developers.google.com/actions/apiai/
This is the perfect document, if you will use API.ai. If you want to learn faster then you have to watch videos. Here is the link for the basic video.
This is the basic video you need to watch :- https://youtu.be/5Al0bfCF-xA
I think this video will help you alot. If still you need some more help for building apps, do reply we will help !
You can test it on your local server by opening up a port on your wifi router and and forward that port to you server ip and port. However, you still https call from api.ai to your local server.
I'm fairly new to programming and this question is about making sure I get the HTTP protocol correctly. My issue is that when I read about HTTP request/response, it looks like it needs to be in a very specific format with a status code, HTTP version number, headers, a blank line followed by the body.
However, after creating a web app with nodejs/express, I never once had to actually write code that made an HTTP response in this format (I'm assuming, although I don't know for sure that other frameworks like ruby on rails or python/Django are the same). In the express app, I just set up the route handlers to render the appropriate pages, when a request was made to that route.
Is this because express is actually putting the response in the correct HTTP format behind the scenes? In other words, if I looked at the expressJS code, would there be something in that code that actually makes an HTTP response in the HTTP format?
My confusion is that, it seems like the HTTP request/response format is so important but somehow I never had to write any code dealing with it for a node/express application. Maybe this is the entire point of a framework like express... to take out the details so that developers can deal with business logic. And if that is correct, does anyone ever write web apps without a framework to do this. Would you then be responsible for writing code that puts the server's response into the exact HTTP format?
I'm fairly new to programming and this question is about making sure I get the HTTP protocol correctly. My issue is that when I read about HTTP request/response, it looks like it needs to be in a very specific format with a status code, HTTP version number, headers, a blank line followed by the body.
Just to give you an idea, there are probably hundreds of specifications that have something to do with the HTTP protocol. They deal with not only the protocol itself, but also with the data format/encoding for everything you send including headers and all the various content types you can send, authentication schemes, caching, status codes, URL decoding, etc.... You can see some of the specifications involved just by looking here: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/.
Now a simple request and a simple text response could get away with only knowing a few of these specifications, but life is not always that simple.
Is this because express is actually putting the response in the correct HTTP format behind the scenes? In other words, if I looked at the expressJS code, would there be something in that code that actually makes an HTTP response in the HTTP format?
Yes, there would. A combination of Express and the HTTP library that is built into node.js handle all the details of the specification for you. That's the advantage of using a library/framework. They even handle different versions of the protocol and feedback from thousands of other developers have helped them to clean up edge case bugs. A good library/framework allows you to still control any detail about the response (headers, content types, status codes, etc..) without making you have to go through the detail work of actually creating the exact response. This is a good thing. It lets you write code faster and lets you ride on the shoulders of others who have already figured out minutiae details that have nothing to do with the logic of your app.
In fact, one could say the same about the TCP protocol below the HTTP protocol. No regular app developer wants to write their own TCP stack. Instead, you just want a working TCP stack that you can use that's already been tuned and debugged for you.
However, after creating a web app with nodejs/express, I never once had to actually write code that made an HTTP response in this format (I'm assuming, although I don't know for sure that other frameworks like ruby on rails or python/Django are the same). In the express app, I just set up the route handlers to render the appropriate pages, when a request was made to that route.
Yes, this is a good thing. The framework did the detail work for you. You just call res.setHeader(), res.status(), res.cookie(), res.send(), res.json(), etc... and Express makes the entire response for you.
And if that is correct, does anyone ever write web apps without a framework to do this. Would you then be responsible for writing code that puts the server's response into the exact HTTP format?
If you didn't use a framework or library of any kind and were programming at the raw TCP level, then yes you would be responsible for all the details of the HTTP protocol. But, hardly anybody other than library developers ever does this because frankly it's just a waste of time. Every single platform has at least one open source library that does this already and even if you were working on a brand new platform, you could go get an open source body of code and port it to your platform much quicker than you could write all this yourself.
Keep in mind that one of the HUGE advantages of node.js is that there's an enormous body of open source code (mostly in NPM and Github) already prepackaged to work with node.js. And, because node.js is server-side where code memory isn't usually tight and where code just comes from the local hard disk at server init time, there's little downside to grabbing a working and tested package that does what you already need, even if you're only going to use 5% of the functionality in the package. Or, worst case, clone an existing repository and modify it to perfectly suit your needs.
Is this because express is actually putting the response in the
correct HTTP format behind the scenes?
Yes, exactly, HTTP is so ubiquitous that almost all programming languages / frameworks handle the actual writing and parsing of HTTP behind the scenes.
Does anyone ever write web apps without a framework to do this. Would
you then be responsible for writing code that puts the server's
response into the exact HTTP format?
Never (unless you're writing code that needs very low level tweaking of HTTP code or something)
I'm still new to AWS and just following the documentation and asking questions here when I get stuck. Please excuse me if this question sounds really noobish.
So far, I've deployed the following:
EB to deploy my REST API
RDS to deploy my psql database
Lambda functions to handle things like authentication & sending JWTs, uploading images to S3, etc.
I have got my basic back end (no caching (just started learning about redis), etc. set up yet, just the bare bones so far) deployed.
I'm still developing my front end, and have not even thought about how I will be deploying it yet (probably another deployment on EB, since I am using universal react). I am just developing it locally but using my production env variables now so I am hitting my deployed API, etc.
One of the MAJOR things I have no idea on how to do is detecting incoming requests from client side to get the client's location by IP address. This is so that I can return the INITIAL results in your general location just like yelp, foursquare, etc. do when you go to to their sites.
For now, I am just building a web app on desktop so I just want to worry about getting the IP address to get the general area of the user. My use case is something similar to other sites you might have used which provides an INITIAL result set for things in your area (think foursquare or yelp).
Here are my questions:
What would be a good way to do this? I'm thinking of handling this in my front end react universal deployment since it will be a node server with rendered page caching. Is this a terrible idea? It would work something like
(1) request from client comes in
(2) get IP from request and lookup the IP location using some service (still not sure what I'm going to use, have found a few plus a nodejs library called node-geoip). Preferably, I can get the zip code since I am trying to save having to do so many queries by unique locations in my database, and instead return results in the zip code and the front end will show an initial map with the initial results in that zip code.
(3) return to client the rendered page with those location params if it exists, otherwise create it, send it, and cache it.
Is the above a really dumb idea? Maybe you have already done something like this, and could share your wisdom :)
Is there an AWS service which can already handle something like this for me? Perhaps there's some functionality which can already do this.
Thanks.
AGAIN - I apologize if this is long winded. I don't know anyone in real life who can help me and I feel alone :(. I appreciate the help you guys can provide.
There are two parts to this:
Getting the user's IP address. You mentioned you're using 'EB' - I presume you mean AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)? If so, then you need to read the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header in your app code, since otherwise what you'll really detect is the ELB's IP address. X-Forwarded-For contains the user's real IP - or rather, the IP of the end-connection being made (there's no telling if this is really a VPN, Proxy or something else-- but it's as far as you can get with an IP.)
Querying an IP DB that can turn the addr into a location object. There are tons of libraries for you. Assuming you're using Node, you can use node-geoip as you mentioned. Or you can just search 'geoip service' on Google and find managed services, like Telize on Mashape. If you don't want to manage the DB lookup yourself or keep the thing up to date, then a managed service would help.
In either case, it's likely that you'll be doing asynchronous look-ups. In that case, you might want to use async/await to get the user's full object before injecting that into your React props and ultimately rendering it as a HTML string that's sent down to the client.
You could also use a library like redial to decorate your components with data requirements, and return a Promise you can await on to know when you're okay to render.
Since you probably want to enable client routing too (i.e. where the user can click on a route in their browser, and the server isn't touched at all), then you will probably need some way to retrieve the IP address/results based on that IP even when the server isn't involved in the initial render.
For that, you could write a REST service that retrieves the results. Or write a GraphQL back-end that gets the data. It doesn't matter how you write it, since the server will have access to the X-Forwarded-For header and can use that to retrieve the results and send back location-aware data.
FYI, I'm writing a React starter kit (called ReactNow) that uses rxjs for handling async streams. It's not ready yet, but it might help you figure out the code layout that would offer a balanced mix between rendering on the server, and writing universal code that requires some heavy lifting from the server.
I am tring to do the following:
I want a SIP User Agent to perform the following steps on receiving an inbound call (call set up request).
1) Read the caller ID from the SIP request and Log the details to file
2) Drop the call (terminate the call without picking up the call)
I have not been able to find a high level api that will let me script this interaction. I have taken a look at Jain but it seems to be a very low level API and I imagine will require a lot of work to get the above interaction coded up and working. Can anyone suggest an apropriate API to implement the above.
NOTE: I have tried ROXEO.com and their CCXML based apps are great but their pricing is aimed at big companies, so Voxeo is not an option.
There are quite a few open source SIP stacks around two examples of many are pjsip and sipsorcery (as a disclaimer I do some dev work on the latter). It will all depend on your language and prefeences as to which one suits. There are also lots of SIP tools around that may be a more efficient approach for you such as SIPp.
Apart from those options and given your very simple requirements you could probably get away with 20 or 30 lines of code that listens on a UDP socket, parses the incoming INVITE to extract the From header and then sends back a rejection response by changing the top line of the request to make it a response and sending it back to where it came from.
If you're using C, try eXosip, you could easily whatever you want.
Here
It's clear that Jain SIP could be quite painful (actually all the configuration but the API otherwise is quite high-level, to manipulate messages) , but you can take the jain-sip-presence-proxy and removes almost everything from their INVITE handler and build your own message
if you're using java, you can use peers which provides a high level api in package net.sourceforge.peers.sip.core.useragent. The entry point is UserAgent class, take a look at gui package if you want to see how it is used. Traces are in log files so you can track calls.
ivrworx but it can handle one scenarion at a time only
Asterisk pbx can act as a simple sip client, and do just that, however if you wante to integrate something in your own solution, take a look at: http://sipsimpleclient.org/projects/sipsimpleclient/wiki/SipMiddlewareApi