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I want to develop real time web application like chatting & real time message conversion. I searched the internet and got confused with few technology
erlang ejabberd nodejs openfire
Right now im in java domain but won't hesitate to learn new things. So can anyone explain what is these technology in a very simple words and what technology i will need to achieve my target ? Does all these do the same thing ? and new technology suggestion from your side will be appriciated.
These are entirely different things :)
At the lowest level you have:
Erlang/OTP is piece of technology, that lets you built low latency, fault tolerant systems. It includes Erlang programming language, Erlang VM and OTP, which is set of patterns, libraries and good practices for writing those systems.
nodejs is a platform, that lets you code JavaScript on server side. It makes your life a little bit easier, when dealing with events, but Erlang is still better saving you from callback hell with actors and messages between them.
At the higher level you have xmpp:
xmpp is eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. This is great for implementing chats like facebook chat, but because it is extensible, you can use it for any kind of messaging.
ejabberd is implementation of xmpp in erlang. There is also fork of ejabberd called MongooseIM. Those will give you great start at developing your messaging application. They implement not only basic xmpp, but also couple of extensions (called xeps in xmpp community).
openfire is solution based on xmpp, so it is even higher level. For chatting and message conversion, this might be overkill, but it depends on your specific needs.
Totally an opinion post:
Erlang: Doing this from scratch with yaws and Erlang is the most straightforward way (its even a code sample in "Programming Erlang" 2nd ed.).
Ejabberd is famously undocumented (and overkill for most webchat services), but it and its better documented/saner cousin (MongooseIM) are robust and already written.
node.js is a cosmic joke played on monolingual ex-frontend web developers.
I've never heard of openfire.
None of these things are bad to learn -- but that's because nothing is ever bad to learn (though some things aren't worth the time you would spend learning them).
The basic problem, I think, is that your goal is probably more broad than you realize, at least in terms of methods by which you can achieve the goal of "develop a web-based chat and communication service". There are a hundred web servers out there, each with its own way of doing active content service, each with a hundred more back-end plugins to a thousand more chat/conversation/comments/blather service frameworks. Any given "technology stack" will often involve a dozen languages throughout it (consider service pages written in PHP from an Apache server which proxies to a Tomcat webserver for pluggable content which calls out to a tiny scheme chat service which stores data in Postgres...).
The situation with most web stacks is, in my opinion, laughable. That is at the core of the Node.js idea, actually: pick a language most people know and stick with it throughout. The problem there is that not every language is well suited to every task (or any task...). But the basic idea that cutting the web tech clutter down is quite sound.
That said, I sincerely think the easiest place to get started is with a relatively tiny language with a small, hyper-knowledgable community around it, and focus on doing everything you can in that language. For this particular task (live web comms) I prefer Erlang and Yaws, writing the service from scratch until some element of it obviously is in need of some pre-written framework treatment. (That is not the right choice of tools for everything, though, so keep an open mind and learn to hate every language, at least a little -- they all suck, just some less than others.)
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I am programming since quite some years now.
Until now I was mainly focused on writing "normal" applications which run inside a console or with a GUI, sometimes also applications which interact with hardware components such as sensors / actors / ...
During this time I got to know a lot of cool programming principles and tools such as object orientation, modularization, unit-testing, test-driven-development, desing-patterns, code-analysis, ..
Also I have some first experience with hosting a wordpress blog, running static web-sites on a nginx webserver, and writing some small php-forms. But I feel like there is still too much magic in all these web-development topics. And I would like to fill this gap and learn a bit more about all these connected scripting / programming languages and technologies. (Because I hate, when I don't understand how things are working :D :D )
I started with some online "Web-development bootcamp" course at udemy to get a rough overview. This took quite some days now and I think HTML, CSS and Javascript for DOM manipulation / animations are clear to me now. Also I heard a lot about NodeJS and all it's derivate languages and databases like Mongo-DB. But still I feel like there is a lot of things unclear to me.
To get to a better understanding I wanted to development some small web-application. Nothing very special, just some website where you have to login to, are able to generate some data and this data is then persisted into a database and once you login again you are able to see the data again.
I first started with developing some classes in Javascript to represent the data in the browser while you are logged in. But I very soon realized that the Javascript which can run inside the browser is very limited and already for unit-testing and modularization into separate files that include each other I actually needed to do some crazy work-arounds or use other server-side languages like nodejs / php / ... .
After some time coding I decided to take one step back, trying to understand the basic design patterns of web-applications and not running for a long time into the wrong direction.
My questions are:
Is there some typical way to go / best practice while developing web-applications?
What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
But are there some do's and don't's that good WebDev's follow?
For example:
which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
What is usually done in the front-end? (Only desing and animations?)
Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of peformance reasons?
What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
What things are typically reused from frameworks, for example authentication and session handling?
Also I felt like some things I know from other programming languages are not so easy in languages like javascript / nodejs. I am willing to spend time and effort into learning all these things but I would also like to keep the quality standards that I know from C++ /
Python. On the other side I also wondered if these patterns that I have in my head are maybe just boundaries that are completely useless in modern web-development? (e.g. typing, object orientation, modularization / splitting the code to be very reusable )
What do you think am I on the wrong track here, or do I maybe simply use the wrong languages?
I hope the long text is not knocking everyone down / keeping everyone from answering me :o
I would really appreciate your help and guidance to understand everything a bit better and to not repeat the things already a lot of others have done wrong ;)
BR, mezorian
First off, most of the questions are very opionated (at least the answers are) and your question will probably be closed for that reason. So I will post my answer before completing it and expand on it after.
First off a good roadmap to become a web developer. I like it mainly because it shows the crazyness the web development world has come to (don't be shocked!): https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-2020-web-developer-roadmap-76503ddfb327
Trying to answer some of your question (answers are my opinion):
Is there some typical way to go / best practice while developing web-applications?
I'm tempted to say there are as many ways to do web development as there are web-developers in the world, but that might be a bit exaggerated. If you want some guidelines, I'd pick one of the major web frameworks and learn the way they do web development. With web frameworks I mean all kinds of frameworks starting with JS-frameworks all the way to static site generators, etc. They all have their ecosystem and their own rules.
What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
(personal opinion) I work with Go in the backend. I love it because it brings back some simplicity in the crazy world of choices being a web developer. Since you know C, Go will probably be easy for you. It has static typing, structs, etc, but no need to manually manage your memory. It is also much faster than most other backend languages used in web development (Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, etc).
In the front-end I have used native JS, jQuery, React, Vue, etc. I'm still waiting for something that makes things easy again. Flutter seems to be something that has a good approach, but is not really a web front framework (yet). (Don't do public websites with Flutter! They are not indexable.) We'll see where it goes.
Databases I will not go into here as that is another huge topic. Let's just say that I'm more a fan of using multiple databases for their specific strengths rather than a big one that is supposed to be good at anything.
which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
Even this depends largely on your choices (framework and preference). One thing for sure has to be in the backend and that is security related stuff. Anything you put in frontend code is visible to an experienced user.
Apart from that there are some ecosystems where you don't write any backend code but talk to a (cloud) service that is basically like a database with a web endpoint on top with secured login. (for example https://firebase.google.com/.) Here the security related stuff is baked into the service.
If you do both, keeping business logic in the backend is probably a good idea. If the frontend calculates something (for quick response), the backend should double check that (e.g. calculating the total in a cart). But this is too general. There can always be use cases where some business logic needs to be implemented in the front-end.
Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of performance reasons?
Performance can be a problem, but mostly because the roundtrip time to the server and back. If you do that for every tiny information, the UI will become sluggish. You might want to think about doing e.g. a calculation client-side.
JS-Frameworks like React, Vue don't request html from the backend, but data and build the html based on that data client-side. I'd use them if I have a very data driven website / webapp, especially if it is user-dependent. Transferring only the data and building the html for every site from it in the browser based on user settings and data, saves a lot of roundtrips.
If you are worried about server performance: For the server to hit its limit, you'd need heavy usage of your website for that to become an issue (at least with Go). If you get there you can still use horizontal scaling (multiple instances of you server) to solve that. Unless you are working for a large company with millions of users daily, I'd not worry about scaling for now.
What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
Warning: Very opionated!
I'd say PHP is dead. Many headhunters I've spoken with agree with me. Companies are desperately looking for PHP developers, because many developers are moving on from PHP to something "cooler". You'll definitely find a job with PHP, but might not be so happy with your job. For me it is also a sign of how modern a company really is (if PHP is not it's main backend language (any more)).
Python currently has a big boom. Mostly because of AI development. I'm not sure if that boom is also in the web development, but I'd say not. I used Python before Go (5+ years ago) and before that PHP (8+ years ago). I rarely get Python web developer job offers (at least compared to PHP and Go).
Go is the language of the cloud. It is perfect for concurrent programming which is an essential part in web development (every http call should be handled concurrently). It is fast and light weight and doesn't need anything installed on the server to run (compiles to a single binary without dependencies).
NodeJS: Haven't used. I'm not a fan of Javascript (but it was (and kind of still is) the only option in the browser), so I never liked the idea of using it also in the backend.
TypeScript: might be an alternative to JavaScript (thinking of frontend here) if you like a more structured language.
It sounded like you want to build a user baser web app with data being managed by each user. This is what I would (probably) do in that case:
Backend in Go
Go serves static files (start html, css, js, images, etc.)
Go server has an api endpoint that serves data (e.g. REST style)
Vue (or React) in the frontend
Vue requests data from the api to build the user-specific content
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I work on studying the development of a medium web application intended for hotlines. So I've real time, concurent access, big datamodel and CTI constraints.
Originaly I'm a php and Java EE developper, but like many of us, I've read a lot of news about node.js and I tested it with small apps. The possibilities of node.js are awesome, but I felt that it's very difficult to only use this technology in a medium/big web app. Indeed frameworks like express are minimalistic compared to productive framework like symfony, play or ROR, etc. Moreover, the node.js ecosystem progresses very fast and might be difficult to maintain.
I'm not experienced enough in nodejs, so I want to know; is choosing only node.js to develop a medium/big business web app with some real time problematics crazy or not? Don't you think that coupling a productive framework with nodejs only for specific features (real time) is a better way ?
Thanks,
Regards
Eric
I'm working on a large real-time business web app that requires some real-time interaction and what we are doing is using django for just about everything, and handling the real-time stuff using the now.js library. Originally we planned on using node.js for everything, but to alleviate some time constraints, we decided it would be quicker to use django.
One thing we have noticed since we've started is that there are a lot of changes, and that some of these changes break what we've done. For the most part, keeping up with the changes hasn't really made it difficult to maintain, however it has made it difficult to follow tutorials and such.
I'm going to answer this quickly, before the question is closed for only being answerable via opinions, not facts.
So, I'm going to answer with my opinion ;)
I think node.js's focus currently is on building small things that respond very quickly. I sense a lot of pushback in the node community against "too complicated abstractions". (It's possible I'm misreading the community, but I don't think so).
To me, building a business app (example: some of my past Rails projects have been 10ish man years) I want an ORM abstraction layer, etc. I think you'd want this building even an app with more than a few man-months of effort in it.
Unless something changes (the node community runs into problems when their code bases grow too large, for example) I suspect the "place" for node.js in medium to big applications is for small hyper responsive things (websockets, retrieving data from external sources and doing small things with it), etc.... not for building an entire big business workflow app.
It's 2016. Recently I decided to go with Sails / Node instead of CakePHP. Today I decided to go back to CakePHP. Lucky enough, I just coded one small module ( kinda of indexing inside a db some filesystem content ). The amount of callbacks and promises It's just annoying to me. The simple task of getting a file's metadata, searching it on Postgres, creating the record only if it doesn't exists, take me more than 20 lines of code and I almost have to drink a bottle of Dramamine lol
This time I am highly determinated to maintain an extreme layer's separation. So my front-end is fully static html/js/css, coded in Angular. Postgres DB also don't require any changes. And CakePHP 3 is almost factory's ready to easily serve json/xml.
Also there's a possibility of me being somehow stupid... lol
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my name is Tabetha and I have a question...
I am a web designer, but I always find that while designing the layout and coding the design I come up with great ideas for websites. I would like to know where I need to start in order to learn back-end programming not only for the knowledge, but also for the challenge of it.
I have searched online but can't seem to find the information I am looking for. If anyone can give me a simple, straight-forward "this is what language you need to learn" answer, or perhaps guide me in the right direction I would appreciate it ten-fold.
I am a complete noob when it comes to this, so even the most basic information is probably a pearl of wisdom for me. :)
With this type of question you will never one simple, straight-forward answer :) Are you a Mac person? If so, you'll probably want to learn PHP or Ruby on Rails for server-side programming, along with MySQL for your database. These technologies are widely used on other operating systems, including Windows. The Apache web server and PHP is included in Mac OS X; Rails is easy to set up. Most hosting providers will offer cheap LAMP hosting packages (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) (Google "LAMP tutorial")
If you're a PC person, you might want to learn about .NET (VB or C#), SQL Server and IIS. There are many similarities in the development practices between the different technologies, with MVC being the recommended design pattern. Understanding MVC is important.
There are many other "back-end" technologies, including JAVA, ColdFusion, etc, but PHP/MySQL is the most common.
You could also learn about server-side content management systems, like Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla to name a few. These systems take care of much of the low level data handling, leaving you to focus more on the content and appearance, while sacrificing some flexibility.
Good luck!
Just to add my two cents. Programming language is in reality not as important as having general knowledge of the principles. Look at it this way: knowing how to program is the same as knowing how to design. Programming language is then only a tool, like photoshop, that you can excel in, but it won't make you a designer by itself.
The concepts that are important for web back-end development and actually a must-know if you're in for a challenge, are object-oriented programming, separation of presentation and computational logic, database abstraction, networking protocols (http specifically).
Understanding these essentials will pay off greatly as compared to learning the quick-and-dirty ways of combining php with html.
PHP is probably the most commonly used backend end language, and will probably give the least problems when setting it up in a server. I would recommend using a Framework (at least to start), both for ease of use and security issues. For this I'd recommend the Zend Framework. There's a great tutorial for getting started here: http://www.survivethedeepend.com/.
I am a heavy advocate of .NET languages for beginners. The .NET framework is nice and easy to wrap your head around because Microsoft is great with documentation, tutorials, and giving a complete package.
As you already have knowledge of HTML I would look into ASP .NET or ASP .NET MVC. This website from Microsoft will take you from start to finish in developing a website in ASP .NET and ASP .NET MVC.
Once you start programming with Visual Studio you will see how easy Microsoft makes it for you.
To get you started with backend development, i would suggest u learn how a database (db) works and the various database management systems (DBMS), particularly relational DBMS (RDBMS) such as MySQL, SQL server, oracle, postGRESQL, Microsoft Access, etc. You will come 2 know that most DBMS allow u to communicate with them and issues commands to them by speaking to them a language called Structured Query Language (SQL). So u will need to invest some time to learn the basics of speaking the SQL language to create a database, store new data or modify existing data, fetch data from the db, or even delete data that is no longer needed from your db. In particular i suggest u learn how MySQL works and issuing commands to MySQL since it is the most widely used DBMS in most web projects. Then, you will need to spend some time to learn about computer programming (issuing instructions to computer) and programming languages (the languages used for writing the instructions). You can zero down to learning how to speak a particular computer language such as PHP. The reason u have to learn how programming languages work is that u will need to speak a computer language (programming language) to write the logic for interacting with your database (e.g verifying that some conditions hold true before certain data can be fetched). I suggest u start by learning the PHP language as your backend programming language, since it is the most widely used in web projects. In the programming langnuage u have chosen to learn (e.g php), find out how to issue SQL commands to a RDBMS from that language. In summary, i recommend you learn the combination of PHP and MySQL since this combination is the most widely used for backend web development. But once u get a grasp of how things really work, you can always switch to whatever combination of technologies works best for your particular project. I hope this helps.
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If you had to redo a site that has around 150 tables and 250,000+ visitors/day in any web platform, what would your choice be and why?
Some points
The team has experienced developers
The old application is written in unrefactored PHP. It's unusable.
Much of the database is not normalized, and there are columns in the wrong spots. Many new features and the database can't support them now.
Desired goals:
Excellent and fast testing (grails is bad for this)
Good seperation of concerns (domain, controllers, views) with ability to not duplicate anything
Concise code & Elegant design - no code bloat
Flexible - we don't want to run into a leaky abstraction problem
Coding and testing are fast - it shouldn't take 1 hour to write a controller test, or we shouldn't have to spend more than 1 minute or so writing a reusable tag, for example.
Scala is on our minds, but we are having a hard time seeing how that can work as the tooling is not mature yet. We actually don't like Grails. A lot of us are used to Java/Spring/Hibernate, but are sick of the low-level nature of it and want something more expressive.
I would put together a detailed study group to analyze our choices, and see what we can use, and how it scales up to the load and tasks it must stand up to. After that, pick out like the top 5 choices for closer inspection, and see what floats with the team. Personally, I've come to like RoR over PHP.
Depending on the status of the old/current project, make sure everything is backed up and version controlled before it gets touched. Some people leave half their project un-vcs'd, or use none at all!
This is a pretty unanswerable question, because there a large number of factors that need to be taken into consideration which you haven't mentioned. For example, what are the skill sets of the developers who will be rewriting it? How is it currently implemented? Can existing code be reused? What are the performance requirements?
If it was my decision, I would choose Groovy/Grails because:
I like Groovy/Grails and know these technologies well
Offers good performance as it's built mostly on Java and mature Java libraries like Spring and Hibernate
Update
Excellent and fast testing (grails is bad for this)
I am not aware of any web framework that puts more effort into testability into Grails. It makes testing all types of artifacts (controllers, domains, services, tag libraries) very straightforward.
We actually don't like Grails
If you already know Java, Spring, and Hibernate, I find it very hard to understand why you don't like Grails.
good old php / mysql / apache on a linux environment is the most stable I've seen .I'm working since 3 year on a Asp.Net / SQL Server / IIS / Windows and only SQL server is stable, but it's really expensive so if you don't know really where you're going (about money), you better have to take care of this parameter.
And on an open environment you'll find more help, I think.
I have a Linux web server and I'd like to make some database tables (currently in Access) available on the web for CRUD. There needs to role-based security. What's the quickest path to develop this?
Also, which database would be best? I already have mySQL running on that box if it makes any difference.
I agree with Chuck, the question shouldn't really be about the language, but about the framework you choose.
I did something similar to you a while back, and ended up using Ruby on Rails, and the activescaffold plugin (http://www.activescaffold.com/) to provide a pretty front end. The actual code I ended up writing was extremely minimal. There are other plugins for Rails which provide role based security too (which I didn't bother with, I just had "you're either logged in and have write access, or you're not logged in and you don't") and which also mean you don't have to write much stuff yourself.
So put me in the camp for Rails come the religious war ;)
Edit: MySQL is a perfect database to use, so you don't have to worry there.
This will turn into a religious war between the Ruby on Rails camp and the Python camp, with a good smattering of the PHP and Perl. You should evaluate the langauges yourself and decide what is best for you. There are, of course, other choices, however listing those would just elicit mroe religious battles. Although, I would say all of those I listed would be reasonable choices. You can usually create a good design in spite of any shortcommings your chosen language may have.
I don't think language is the question you should be asking. There's no language particularly well-suited to CRUD Web apps. There are many frameworks designed for that sort of thing, though, in many different languages, and those are probably what you'll want to look at.
I think Rails is the best in general, and that's what I use for most projects. It's very well-suited to CRUD apps (to the point where it allows you to create a simple one without writing any code at all). But if there really were an undisputed "best" choice, you'd probably already know about it. Instead, some apps are made with Rails, some with Django, some with Cake, and so on and so forth.
If you want a solid, clean, stable CRUD web app that can be maintained and expanded for years to come, stick with the standards: PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Learn those roots languages well. Take the time to do it right and focus on good coding habits like clarity, consistency, and organization. Practice good reuse of code, good naming, good commenting, and good database design. Test, document, and refactor. Take pride in the craftsmanship of your CRUD app. Learn it inside and out. Set the stage so you can later maintain and expand it. Your goal is to build something that will work well, last a long time, and make a great return on the business investment. Someone once said that it takes 10 years to become a good coder.
As for frameworks, plugins, and external libraries, that's wonderful icing to put on your cake. But never confuse the icing with the cake. If you want to learn to code, take the time to learn it right. If you're not comfortable coding a simple CRUD app, you'll be even less comfortable trying to navigate the framework-generated code. Coding is a wonderful gig. But never mistake the sizzle for the steak.