Is it okay to develop a company's system in google app engine? The system will just have simple CRUD functionalities and should be used only by customers of the company.
Another option is to have it written in PHP CodeIgniter.
I am more experienced with google-app-engine.
Which one should I go through? Thanks.
Have look at the case studies given at this products, This could definitely clear your picture in all prospect.
App Engine is great when you can delegate part of the processing to the clients. So It's more designed for web apps - RIAs (something easily called "Google-like web pages").
PHP, on the other hand, is a server-side script, just like JSP, ASP and so on. So you have different worlds to deal with. My 2 cents: for simple CRUD, use the fastest approach for you to develop it, in this case App Engine with the technology you're used to.
Related
Could I get some advice on what is the better way?
My questions regard Play framework, Google App Engine and web development.
So I am about to start writing a website which (the hope is) will be become quite popular and therefore will need to scale. I have heard from more experienced developers that my system will not work (a play framework on a VPS backed by Mysql). Apparently this just does not scale. Especially if storing and searching through many
It has been suggested that I use a system like Google App Engine (GAE) that handles all the scalability aspects. However I am just starting to realise that this means a different mind set (Application Centric).
My main question is whether I should still use play framework? The default way of using GAE is using plain Java servlets but I have found a plug in that allows play to interact with it. I like working with play but I am worried that this will diminish all the benefits of GAE scalability rendering the effort in porting my application to GAE useless.
Can anyone give some advice?
Update - to further explain:
I was worried about using components that play framework provides such as sessions, cookies, etc. I am assuming that these will not be scalable unless I use the GAE api directly? I have heard that storing state like sessions is not very good and I should use the provided APIS. Or does Play's plug in already handle this?
Also,
Cheers
I´m soon to start a new mobile app project and I dont have that much experience with either iOS or Android development but I have used Vaadin for presentation tier on different occasions.
The app will most likely be lightweight for the mobile client but more heavy for backend servers(jboss). I feel kinda lost so i´m asking you.
Question: What are the drawbacks of using Vaadin touchkit compared to other frameworks/ build from scratch? Where might a problem occur? Any input and recommendations are welcome!
I am currently developing a small application using Vaadin TouchKit that once it enters production will have some hundreds of users. I haven't been able to locate any publicly available apps in production that have been implemented using Vaadin Touchkit, so what I'm going to list here is based solely on my personal experience with the technology.
Drawbacks compared to native applications:
I'm assuming this is what you refer by "building from scratch".
As this is web techonology, your application performance will always correlate heavily with the quality of the users Internet connection. If you have to render large UI's with a lot of components and details, it will be slower than doing so in a native application. A lot slower if the users connection is poor. Or if a connection is unavailable, then your application pretty much becomes unavailable. There is a way to use HTML5-cache for providing an offline-mode in a Vaadin Touchkit app, but it is not very useful for storing large datasets as the cache has a lot more limitations than for example an Android SQLite database. For simple UI-stuff it might be viable, but storing data for offline-access is in my opinion pretty much out of the question.
Other than the above mentioned points, I have not run into any missing capability, as you can use any Java library at any time on the server-side, and your application will be running safely in a servlet container.
Upsides compared to native applications:
You didn't spesifically ask for the upsides, but I guess this is any input and recommendations.
Your Vaadin Touchkit app can run on basically any mid-high tier mobile device launched after 2010, basically excluding only the ones with Windows Phone OS, since Internet Explorer does not use WebKit for rendering and other browsers are not available as far as I know. And since this is a web application, it does not exclude any other desktop browsers than Internet Explorer. By creating one application, you support roughly 80-95% of your users.
As mentioned, any Java library, any internal API, any authentication method supported by your hosting environment is available to your app, which is not as easy to implement for native mobile applications. This can be overcome with great software engineering, but demands a significantly higher amount of developer resources, not to mention that you are still stuck doing it for each platform separately.
And of course maintenance of a servlet app compared to the maintenance of a native application is considerably more simple: deploy once, all users get the changes without doing anything. No app store, no versioning, no hassle.
Vaadin TouchKit compared to other web development:
I am not familiar, at all, with web application development without using Vaadin, so I am not going to tell you whether or not it is the way to go compared to other modern web application technologies and frameworks. All I'll say is that in my experience Vaadin makes creating UI's and backend functionality relevantly easy and more graspable if you are familiar with Java development and desktop application development in general.
To conclude, don't rush in to create your mission critical application using Vaadin TouchKit before at least prototyping with it, and getting to know the performance and limitations it presents. For certain type of applications, it might be one of the best solutions. For a certain, larger group than the other, it is probably one of the worst. It is not a very mature or generally adopted framework, but it is useful. I'll be happy to hear more about the type of app you're planning and help you figure out if there are any showstoppers for using Vaadin TouchKit.
P.S. You've probably already run into this, but this document opens up the guts of one of the TouchKit demo apps:
http://demo.vaadin.com/vornitologist/VAADIN/tutorial/touchkit-tutorial.html
I just tried out vaadin touchkit examples on my android phones, well now I got affirmation why I prefer native software over html in some cases. Try it out - dont be confused by nice-looking styles, just try to USE it, this is what apps are made for. In my case I cannot withstand non responsive GUI or not smoothly scrolling lists. Again, for a simple gallery - a JavaScript/HTML solution is just perfect :) So the right way is the hybrid way! (imho)
Vaadin Touchkit offers very good user experience and provides wide range of UI components to apps.
Its default iOS theme provide almost iOS like UI and it also offers many other themes too.
But this will not run as smooth as platform specific mobile apps. as ultimately it will not completely leverage the real power of mobile platform features as finally it is going to run in a mobile web browser. as compared to native mobile apps
Find more detail on vaadin touchkit and comparison with similar technogies like ZK Mobile and native platform specific apps. : http://jtechnoprojects.blogspot.in/2012/12/vaadin-touchkit-vs-zk-mobile-vs.html
I have been doing android programming for a while now but only as a hobby. I know the basics of java, and can say I have a solid understanding of PHP and MySQL (I once followed a tutorial that showed how to create a very basic content management system). I've been wanting to expand my knowledge beyond the simple android apps I've made and recently had an idea for an android app. In this app, the user would create a Username and password the first time it is ran. From then, the user can fill out a form. From what i know so far, the valuesof this form can be stored in a MySQL database. So basically every user needs to have their own set of variables stored (which are not a lot). As I been looking around, i think there are many ways to create a web app, and there are different frameworks for doing so. I read I can create a web app with log-in, using ASP.NET. Can this be done using java? I just need some general guidance. I want to make the web app standalone, and then focus on creating an app for android that uses it.
I think good platform for your kind of case is to use Google App Engine (GAE). It provides platform to do your web-service with Java (or python if you prefer). It is also free for low amounts of traffic (like your service) and they have really good tools to manage the site (check the database entries, usage statistics, etc.).
Google has written a good set of tutorials to build webservice with Java in GAE:
http://googcloudlabs.appspot.com/
AppEngine documentation main page:
http://code.google.com/intl/fi-FI/appengine/
Signup here:
https://appengine.google.com/
I think you may want to look at JavaServer Pages.
I just started working on a project which will about making a big website.
With big i mean:
Webshop
Forum
Normal Website (Information pages etc..)
At first i just wanted to pick a decent open-source webshop and just built my site around it.
But then i started thinking about how to expand etc.
I started to think how i would like this website to be acces from a mobile phone. Not just with a browser but with an App. (I have decent experience in making apps for Android & Iphone). So the real question is:
Would it be smart to make the "Core" of my whole website in Java and use services to acces it and thus allowing different frontends to use the same "Core". Like:
- PHP for browser frontend
- Java (android) for the android App
- Objective C for the IPhone App.
And let them all just communication to the "Core" through REST (Json).
What will be the advantages / disadvantages with this approach and will there be a significant delay in rendering eg. a webpage (http request to php, then php making calls to java server (different physical server) then accessing the database and then returning it all, so php can format it to HTML).
Hope hearing some answers or suggestions!
I would skip the Java layer and make the "core" PHP. There is a wealth of tools and frameworks (like Zend FW) for building thoses components in PHP. Design your application around a REST interface and allow your mobile apps to use REST.
Better yet, use Rails. It's so easy to design and set up a REST interface.
I think your solution is “smart”. The only changes I suggest are:
Use the same platform to build both the "core" and the "browser frontend." This way you will have more productivity.
Keep the "core" and "browser" frontend on the same server, if possible in the same process. Unless you have a reason do it differently. This will reduce problems with performance, latency and so on.
If you're already familiar with Java I would suggest you look at something like GWT (or GWT + third-party libraries like Ext GWT or Smart GWT) for your front-end. I don't see the point in picking another language for the front-end unless you really want to learn something else (e.g. PHP as you suggest in your question).
I think the rest of your approach is sound (i.e. Java on the backend, providing RESTful services, etc.)
Can you let me know on the pros and cons of using richfaces and are there any alternatives for it. Its for a proposal submission for a web application. Its for managing documents and it will be intranet. There will be lots of users and main concern is security and ease of use.
Don't do it like that.
I suggest you to ask the same question to your team, after all they are the one, who will be developing it.
You must understand and find out what exactly is JSP, JSF, RichFaces, IceFaces, Facelets, AJAX, etc. are. You must know what all these technologies are meant for, and how and where they can be applied to solve which problem.
You should make a toy application using few viable alternatives, i.e. IceFaces, RichFaces, etc.. Then evaluate considering ease of use, support, strength, etc.
It all depends on what you are creating, what your target audience is, which type of devices are used for accessing your application etc
If you are creating something that has to be really lightweight, for example, something that must be browsable on mobile devices, then you should consider how much of the code is executed in the browser, keep that end light and do the heavy work on the server side.
If you are creating something that has to be access with text based browsers, then you should keep your site as simple as possible and make sure you have full control of the DOM structure.
If you are creating something that has to be indexed by search engines (an application like an eCommerce site), then you have to remember that applications made with AJAX-based frameworks will not be indexed by search engines, as search engines look at the static content of the page (by which I mean that the content hasn't been modified by javascript). If you really want to use a RIA framework to create you frontend, there are workarounds to enable search engine indexing, but that's a whole another topic.
On the other hand, if you are making a web application, something like an accounting system or the management part of an eCommerce site, then you can and should consider full blown RIA solutions, because these kind of application do not need to be indexed by search engines and they are often (if not always) accessed through a modern browser on a PC or Mac. Popular RIA frameworks include Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, IceFaces etc.
http://www.icefaces.org/JForum/posts/list/8347.page and http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5202018
The company that I work for is using AJAX, PHP & MySQL for Web Applications such as Social Networking, Community Sites, Online Booking Applications, etc. on a Standard Comentum Framework (MVC).
For Ecommerce Applications, we use Zend Framework. I think Zend Framework does a good job preventing programmers from sloppy coding:
http://www.comentum.com/web-application-development.html