I'm trying to create a web application which will get input from system.
What this application should do is to listen what happens when some shell scripts are executing and reporting the status trough web.
An example :
I'm copying thousands of records with shell script, and while this is still executing I'd like pass the current status of the script to the web interface. From shell script side I could echo something like "The files are being copied please wait for it to finnish".
Using which programming language from shell side would be the easiest way to pass this to the web interface? I intended to use JSP/JAVA for web.
Is this even the right way to think about this? Every suggestion is welcome
EDIT
Would something like http://nodejs.org/ be useful for this?
I'd use a named pipe (FIFO) instead. You simply write your output to the pipe and let the application read it. I'm not sure if there is any other way to get a more live system than this.
I'd recommend Perl as the back-end.
EDIT:
named pipes are a special type of files on UNIX. The abbreviation FIFO stands for "First In First Out". On LINUX Journal you can find an interesting read about named pipes.
Perl is a very powerful scripting language with many ready-to-use modules which you can find on http://cpan.org. You can find some answers here on SO about how/where to start learning Perl.
The Web part of your application can easily read a file or a database, so you just need to make sure that your shell scripts are outputting something for your Java code to update.
For example, if you run your shell script like this
./myscript.sh > mylog.log
Then in your Java code (note that you should not have logic in your JSP), you can read in the file to determine the status of the update, and output the result to your JSP.
It would be better to read the data in from a database, but that would involve you changing your shell script to output the data to a database.
You could put shell script output to some storage on server. And use AJAX on the web page to poll the server and get updates from that storage to the page.
If you will decide to use JSF for web page creation I can recommend "a4j:poll" component from ajax2jsf library. It is very simple and straightforward. Very easy way to poll server from the web page.
Writing to log file would be the simplest solution. And in programming, simple often means good.
If you really need very fast/realtime system, you should probably make these logs a database.
As for language, use what you like best. They all do support SQLite, including bash.
If I understand your question correctly you want to display a web page on a client machine that reports the status of a long running task on a server machine. If that is the case then you need to focus on something called AJAX IMO.
For what it is worth the simplest and easiest to understand implementation of AJAX that I know of is Apache Wicket.
Related
I am designing a Java applet based application that has to interact with "KNIME".I want to take a file as input in the applet and send that to "KNIME" file reader.I want to generate a histogram from JFreeChart and and writing the output into a JPEG file through image port writer node.I want the image file output to be displayed in the applet.
May i know how i could connect my application with knime(which is already running) for reading input data and execution of workflow.Are there any nodes that could help me in this work.
You can run any external application by using the External Tool Node.
To trigger the workflow from your applet, consider running KNIME in CLI mode, as described here. Make use of some workflow variables to set the input/output file path to your workflow as described in the given FAQ. A potential issue I see might be some latency caused by the startup time of the application.
[edit] After thinking for a second time, I have some doubts that it's at all possible to start a local application from an applet. In fact, I strongly assume, it's not possible :) If you want to stick to your applet, you could add some intermediate REST service though, with which the applet interacts. After submitting the input data, the server side triggers the workflow and returns the result. Or you switch to some standard Swing application instead.
It is possible to call KNIME in batch mode and pass over parameters as Flow Variables. These Flow Variables can be used to configure node dialogs, such as the File Reader (path to file) automatically. See e.g.:
http://tech.knime.org/node/20877
http://tech.knime.org/forum/knime-developers/setting-flow-variables-on-command-line
for details.
If you have a KNIME server running, then you can achieve what you want via the REST api. There is a fairly detailed introduction to doing that here - https://www.knime.org/blog/the-knime-server-rest-api
I created a small application that, when run, creates or updates some tables in a database by extracting data from some PDF files. Everything works fine in this desktop application, but the next step for me would be to make it possible for an administrator on a website to upload a PDF file and my Java program would then run and update the tables accordingly.
The problem is I have no idea where to start with this (the site isn't done yet, but I'm running some tests and it is going to be coded in PHP). I'd like to know what kind of technologies I need to let the server run the program and update everything as it would in the offline version. Sometimes it takes a while to update everything, so ideally, the user uploading the PDF could continue browsing other pages while the server does its job. (I'll probably implement something that when the server is done processing the file, it says if the program ended successfully or not in a log file)
Can someone tell me what terms to search for on Google or give me some pointers? I haven't chosen where my website is going to be hosted either, so if someone could tell me what to look for to know if they support running applications like this, I'd really appreciate it as well!
This could also apply to other programming languages as I know a bit of Python and C++ as well, so in the future I might have some applications in those languages I'll want to use on the web.
If I'm not approaching this the right way, I'm open to other suggestions, but the best solution would be to keep my Java program intact as I know it works exactly like I want it to and I'd rather not have to start it all over again.
If your host is *NIX based you can use crontab (Automatic Task Scheduler) to run your program at set intervals. Make it check if a "new" PDF exists, and run the program if there is. There may be a way to use Windows Task Scheduler type programs to do it on Windows. This is probably the easiest way.
Alternately you can use You can use shell_exec() in your php to execute a command on your *NIX system directly to run your java program.
So I'm working on a project where I would like to be able to have the user browse the Active Directory to find a machine or workstation. I already know that you can envoke this directory search in the command prompt by using:
rundll32 dsquery,OpenQueryWindow
I'm using java for my project and I understand how to capture input from a command that I execute in the program but currently, at home, I'm not connected to a domain so I cannot test what the command returns when a user selects a computer or if it even returns anything. Could someone test this for me and tell me what it returns.
Also, if anyone has any better ideas on how to achieve this without relying on window's tools, like maybe a Java API for Active Directory Services?
Instead of calling an API function using rundll32, you should use a Java based LDAP library which will encapsulate the work in front of the Active Directory (so you won't have to parse the results by yourself).
Also, if anyone has any better ideas on how to achieve this without relying on window's tools, like maybe a Java API for Active Directory Services?
Choosing a pure Java library could help you run your application on many platforms (as opposed to using Windows' rundll32 which will limit you to Windows platform)
Check out this thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/389746/ldap-java-library.
currently, at home, I'm not connected to a domain so I cannot test what the command returns
There are solutions for this kind of testing problems. You should read about mocking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_object
Good luck!
Tal.
Talk to the AD via the LDAP API.
Although I've been programming for a few years I've only really dabbled in the web side of things, it's been more application based for computers up until now. I was wondering, in java for example, what library defined function or self defined function I would use to have a program launch a web browser to a certain site? Also as an extension to this how could I have it find a certain field in the website like a search box for instance (if it wasnt the current target of the cursor) and then populate it with a string and submit it to the server? (maybe this is a kind of find by ID scenario?!)
Also, is there a way to control whethere this is visible or not to the user. What I mean is, if I want to do something as a background task whilst the user carries on using the program, I will want the program to be submitting data to a webpage without the whole visual side of things that would interrupt the user?
This may be basic but like I say, I've never tried my hand at it so perhaps if someone could just provide some rough code outlines I'd really appreciate it.
Many thanks
I think Selenium might be what you are looking for.
Selenium allows you to start a Web browser, launch it to a certain website and interact with it. Also, there is a Java API (and a lot of other languages, by the way) allowing you to control the launched browser from a Java application.
There are some tweaking to do, but you can also launch Selenium in background, using a headless Web browser.
as i understand it you want to submit data to a server via the excisting webinterface?
in that case you need to find out how the URL for the request is build and then make a http-call using the corresponding URL
i advice reading this if it involves a POST submit
I am working on an application in Linux which will interfaces with hardware. One of the requirements is to create the GUI in Web-browser . the application will be c++ based. I m not familiar with web realted stuff so i want to know Is it possible to do such a thing (currently it's a console application take input from txt file/cmd line). gui will be simple using button and showing output messages on browser from the application. i want to know which technologies/languages are involved and how can it be done. some of the idea i read but havn't found anything concrete yet. if u have any idea about these or a better suggestion please share
run the app in background and communicate with browser ?
call library functions directly from browser ?
any other idea ?
I would start by setting up a regular HTTP server, like lighttp or Apache httpd.
You say you already have a command line program that does the actual work - As a first step, I would reuse that, and configure the web server to call your program using CGI - see forexample http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/cgi.html for apache
Finally, I'd pick some javascript framework like jQuery or YUI with Ajax capabilities to do requests to the server to call the CGI script from within a webpage. You could also create a form-based web application without ajax or any framework, but that would require you to stuff all kinds of logic in your program to generate HTML pages. By using Ajax, you can leave the command line application as is, and parse any responses it gives with javascript, and then use that to dynamically change the webpage in a way that would make sense to the user.
If this all works, then I would try to figure out how to package all these components. Perhaps you just want to create a simple archive with all the programs inside, or maybe you want to go as far as actually embedding the webserver in your program. Alternatively, you may want to do it the other way around and rewrite your program as an ISAPI module that you can plug into your webserver. Or if that's not integrated enough still you could write your own (partial) HTTP server. That's really up to you (I'd probably spend time and energy on searching for the leanest, meanest existing open source http serverr and use that instead)
At any rate, the prior steps won't be lost work. Most likely, developing the web page is going form a substantial part of the work, so I would probably create a quick and dirty working solution first using the age-old CGI trick, and then develop the webpage to my satisfaction. At that point you can already have an acceptable distributable solution by simply putting all programs in a single archive (of course you would have to tweak the webserver's configuration too, like changing the default port so it won't interfere with existing webservers.) Only after that I would spend time on creating a more integrated fancy solution.
I ended up using Wt though I'd update for future reference.
These are how I thought of doing this, in order of complexity for me:
Create a simple server-side-language (PHP/Python) website that can communicate with (ie launch and process the return of) your application
Modify your application to have a built-in webserver that just punched out HTML (command line parameters taken through the URL)
Modify the app to publish JSON and use javascript on a simple HTML page to pull it in.
You could write a Java applet (as you've tagged this thread) but I think you'd be wasting time. This can be quite simple if you're willing to spend 10 minutes looking up a few simple commands.
After 12 years, web browser-based GUI started to appear, WebUI is one of them.