I'm tasked with creating a web app (I think?) for my job that will tracker something in our system. It'll be an internal tool that staff uses to keep track of the status of one of the things we do. It should look like trello, with cards that drag from step to step. That frontend exists, but my job is to make the system update when the cards are dragged. This requires using an API in Python and isn't that complicated to grab from/update. I have no idea how to put all of this together. My job is almost completely nontechnical and there's no one internally who knows what I'm doing except for me. I'm in so over my head here and have no idea where to begin. Is this something I should deploy on Elastic Beanstalk? EC2? How do I tie this together and put it somewhere?
Are you trying to pull in live data from Trello or from your companies own internal project management tool?
An EC2 might be useful, but honestly, it may be completely unnecessary if your company has its own servers. An EC2 is basically just a collection of rental computers to help with scaling. I have never used beanstalk so my input would be useless there.
From what I can assume from the question, you could have a python script running to pull from the API and make the changes without an EC2.
First thing you should do is gather as much information about what the end product should look like. From your question, I have the feeling that you have only a vague idea of what the stakeholders want. Don't be afraid to ask more clarification about an unclear task. It's better to spend 30 minutes discussing and taking note than to show the end-product after a month and realizing that's not what your boss/team wanted.
Question I would Ask
Who is going to be using this app? (technical or non-technical person)
For what purpose is this being developed?
Does it need to be on the web or can it be used locally?
How many users need to have access to this application?
Are we handling sensitive information with this application?
Will this need to be augmented with other functionality at some point?
This is just a sample of what I would ask, during the conversation with the stakeholder a lot more will pop up for sure.
What I think you have to do
You need to make a monitoring system for the tasks that need to be done by your development team (like a Kanban)
What I think you already have
A frontend with the card that are draggable to each bin. I also assume that you can create a new card and delete one in the frontend. The frontend is most likely written in React, Angular or Vue.js. You might also have no frontend framework (a mix of jQuery and vanilla js), but usually frontend developper end up picking a framework of sort to help the development.
A backend API in Python (in Flask or with Django-rest-framework most likely) that is communicating with a SQL database like postgresql or a Document database like MongoDB.
I'm making a lot of assumption here, but your aim should be to understand the technology you will be working with in order to check which hosting would work best. For instance, if the database that is setup is a MySQL database you might have some trouble with some hosting provider.
What I think you are missing
Currently the frontend and the backend don't communicate to each other. When you drag a card it won't persist if you refresh the page. Also, all of this is sitting in your computer and cannot be used by any one from your staff. You need to first connect the frontend with the backend so that the application has persistance. Then you need to deploy this application somewhere so that it is reachable by your staff.
What I would do is first work locally to make sure that the layer of persistance is working. This imply having the API server, the frontend server and the database server running simultaneously on your computer to develop. You should then fetch data from the API to know which cards are there in the database and then create them visually in your frontend at the right spot.
When you drop a card to a new spot after having dragging it should trigger a POST request to your API server in order to update the status of this particular card (look at the documentation of your API to check what you need to send).
The server should be sending back an updated version of the cards status if the POST request was sucessful, so your application should then just redraw the card at the right spot (it won't make a difference for you since they are already at the right spot and your frontend framework will most likely won't act on this change since the state hasn't changed). That's all I would do for that part.
I would then move to the deployment phase to make sure that whatever you did locally can still work online. I would use Heroku to start instead of jumping directly to AWS. Heroku is a service built on top of AWS which manage a lot of the complexity of AWS for you. This is great for prototyping and it means that when your stuff is ready you can migrate to AWS easily and be confident that a setup exist to make your app work. You might also be tied up to your company servers, which is another thing I would ask to the stakeholder (i.e. where can I put this application and where I can't put it).
The flow for a frontend + api + database application on Heroku is usually as follow. You create a github repo for your frontend (make it private) and you create an app on Heroku that will watch this repository for changes. It will re-deploy the application for you when it sees a change at a specific subdomain of Heroku hosting. You will need to configure some procfiles that will tell Heroku what to do with a given application type. This is where you need to double check what frontend you are using since that might change the procfiles used. It's most likely a node.js based frontend (React, Angular or Vue) so head over here for the documentation of how to put that online.
You will need to make a repo for the backend also that is separate from the frontend, these two entities are distinct and they only communicate through HTTP request (frontend->backend) and JSON (backend->frontend). You will need to follow the same idea as with the frontend to deploy, head over here.
Once you have these two online, you need to create a database on Heroku. This is done by adding a datastore to your api, head over here. There are some framework specific configuration you need to do to make the API talk to an online database, but then you will need to find that configuration on the framework documentation. The database could also be already up and living on your server, if this is the case you just need to configure your online backend to talk to that particular database at a particular address.
Once all of the above is done, re-test your application to check if you get the same behavior as before. This is a usable MVP, however there are no layer of security. Anyone with the right URL could just fetch your frontend and start messing around with your data.
There is more engineering that need to be done to make this a viable end product. This leads us to my final remark: why you are not using a product like Trello, Jira, or even Github Project? If it is to save some money on not paying for a subscription I think you should factor in the cost of development, security and maintenance of this application.
Hope it helps!
One simple option is Heroku for deploy your API and your frontend application.
Related
Im creating a server in Python that receives POST requests, process the information in the request using some scripts (sometimes using a database) and send back a answer in JSON format. Im searching for a way to run this server and code in the cloud, in a way that i dont need my PC turned on for it to work, because my connection is very unstable.
There are a lot of web hosting companies out there, you just need to find the one that is right for you.
My personal favorite for python apps is heroku, but there are many out there. AWS is another popular one.
In future when asking questions, try to do more research before hand, and try to be more specific with questions. It would have been useful to know what kind of database you are using, or whether you're using flask or django.
I am a web backend developer. In the past, I've used a lot of Python and specifically django to create custom APIs to serve data, in JSON for instance, to web frontends.
Now, I am facing the task of developing a mobile backend that needs to provides services such as push notifications, geolocating etc. I am aware of the existing mBaaS providers which could definitely address a lot of the issues with the task at hand, however, the project requires a lot of custom backend code, async tasks, algorithms to perform calculations on the data that in response trigger additional behavior, as well as an extensive back office.
Looking at the features of the popular mBaaS provider, I feel like they are not able to meet all my needs, however it would be nice to use some of their features such as push notifications, instead of developing my own. Am I completely mistaken about mBaaS providers? Is this sort of hybrid approach even possible?
Thanks!
There are a ton of options out there. Personally, I'm still looking for the holy grail of mBaaS providers. I've tried Parse, DreamFactory, and most recently Azure Mobility Services.
All three are great getting started from PoC to v1, but the devil is always in the details. There are a few details to watch out for:
You sacrifice control and for simplicity. Stay in the lanes and things should work. The moment you want to do something else is when complexity creeps in.
You are at the mercy of their infrastructure. Yes -- even Amazon and Azure go down from time to time. Note -- Dreamfactory is a self-hosted solution.
You are locked into their platform. Any extra code customizations
you make with their hooks (ie - Parse's "CloudCode" and Azure's API
scripts) will most likely not port to another platform.
Given the learning curve and tradeoffs involved I think you should just play the strong hand you already have. Why not host an Django app on Heroku? Add on DjangoRestFramework and you basically can get a mBaas up and running in less than a day.
Heroku has plenty of third party providers for things like Push notifications, Authentication mechanisms, and even search engines (Elasticsearch).
All that is required is to drop the right "pip install" code into your controllers and you are off an running.
Currently I am working on a portal which is exposed to end users. This portal is developed using Python 2.7, Django 1.6 and MySQL.
Now we want to expose this portal as a mobile app. But current design does not support that as templates, views and database are tightly coupled with each other. So we decided to re-architect the whole portal. After some research I found following:
Client side: AngularJS for all client side operations like show data and get data using ajax.
Server side: Rest API exposed to AngularJS. This Rest API can be developed using either Tastypie or Django Rest Framework (still not decided). Rest API will be exposed over Django.
I have few questions:
What you guys think about architecture? Is this is a good or bad design? How it can be improved?
Will performance of portal will go down after adding above layers in architecture?
In the above architecture whether 2 servers should be used to run this (like one for client and other for serving the API's) or one server will be enough. Currently Heroku is used for deployment.
Currently portal is getting 10K hits in a day and it is expected to go to 100K a day in 6 months. Will be happy to provide more information if needed.
If i got an opportunity to architect the portal which you mentioned than i would really love to design the architecture which i have already explained here.
What you guys think about architecture?
This is a common Service Oriented Architecture with decoupled Clients. You just have REST endpoints on your backend, and any Client can consume those endpoints.
You should also think about:
Do you need RESTful service (RESTful == stateless, will you store any state on the server?)
How to scale the service in the future? (this is a legit thing as you already aware of huge traffic increase and assume 2 servers)
How it can be improved?
Use scala instead of python :)
Will performance of portal will go down after adding above layers in architecture?
It depends.
It will get some performance penalty (any additional abtract layer has it's tax), but most probably you won't event notice it. But still, you should measure it using some stress tests.
In the above architecture whether 2 servers should be used to run this (like one for client and other for serving the API's) or one server will be enough. Currently Heroku is used for deployment.
Well, as usual, it depends.
It depends on the usage profile you have right now and on the resources available.
If you are interested in whether the new design will perform better than the old one? - there are a number of parameters.
Resume
This is a good overall approach for the system with different clients.
It will allow you:
Totally decouple mobile app and frontend development from backend development. (It could be different independent teams, outsourceable)
Standardize your API layer (as all clients will consume the same endpoints)
Make you service scalable easier (this includes the separate webserver for static assets and many more).
I have a django application hosted on a server running on Apache + Ubuntu. I deployed the application using mod_wsgi. Is there any way to find out the number of visitors to my web site.
I realize that this query might have little to do with django and more do with the server. Any help would be appreciated.
Why not just use Google Analytics? You can easily monitor user behavior, traffic source, time spend on each page, etc.
If you really want to do this with Django you could write a context processor to record each request, but then you would have to write the user's IP and check if the user has not visited before and this would be incredibly imprecise since there might be different users sharing the same IP, etc.
How about using some free statistics provider like Statcounter or Google Analytics?
If you don't want to use Google Analytics or similar, but do it all yourself, you have two options:
One is to alter all views, if you are using class-based view then add a mixin (see this SO question for more information about mixins,) or if you are using the old function-based view you have to manually call another function to keep track.
The other alternative, and probably best one, is to write a middleware class, and keep track through that.
There's also this free and powerful Django app Chartbeat that you could try to work with.
Chartbeat provides real-time analytics to websites and blogs. It shows visitors, load times, and referring sites on a minute-by-minute basis. The service also provides alerts the second your website crashes or slows to a crawl.
https://django-analytical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/services/chartbeat.html
I am working on a Python App, which runs on App Engine. Is there a way I can publish the app on each customers' appSpot account, so that the App uses the users' cloud storage? Instead of running the App on my AppSpot account and all the users storing the data on my Cloud space?
Yes, absolutely.
You just need to have each client create an App Engine account with an application to which you have administrator access. You can adjust the settings on the application to forbid downloads of your code by the other administrators if that's appropriate for your agreement with the client. This also allows the clients to be billed directly for their instances' usage, and makes it completely impossible for data to leak between different clients' instances.
Using multiple applications for multiple clients who are licensing your application almost certainly does not violate part 4.4 of the TOS, although don't take this as legal advice.
No, you cannot do that. The app is hosted and run in the administrator's account which would be you. What you can do is, release the source code and point your users do install it in their appspot account, just like creating a new application.
I suppose it's not exactly what you need. But it can give you an idea where to go. Please check DryDrop project. There is small Python application you can ask each user to install on their account, then they can configure it to fetch your site files from your GitHub repo through webhooks functionality. I didn't try it, but, theoretically, you update your site, commit it to your repo, and all users get your updated application automatically. You can share your thoughts if that works for you.
Maybe. If it's an open source app that you're giving away, you can publish the source and instruct users to upload it to their own accounts.
If you're selling the app, displaying ads or otherwise trying to monetize the service, you probably want to stick with one instance. Using multiple instances to avoid paying for quota usage is direct violation of the App Engine TOS:
4.4. You may not develop multiple Applications to simulate or act as a
single Application or otherwise access
the Service in a manner intended to
avoid incurring fees.
No. Writing an application that deploys other applications is in violation of the terms of service.
Note we don't have any 'hard' limits - those limits that aren't billing enabled can be increased on application to us if you provide a reasonable use-case.