How does e-commerce usually handle integrations with ERP software?
We are working on a project for a client, who previously planned to use an ERP system that had a REST API.
This API allowed us to:
Place orders
Inform the ERP if the order was paid for
Get order status
Get all of the items available
Check item availability
Get user data
That would allow us to build a fairly complex online store with a lot of features.
Now the client wants to use another ERP system:
http://www.netsuite.com/portal/platform.shtml
I researched it, and the difficulty of integration surprised me. No REST API, some weird SOAP protocol to communicate with the system, and you have to write a lot of logic using SuiteScript. A whole new, different programming language just to build an integration with an online store? Why not just give developers access to an API to place orders and fetch items? And there are absolutely no docs available online for the thing. People on forums are saying that the system lacks in documentation and one has figure it out himself, along the way.
Magento and Shopify integration is done by third parties and looks dodgy. Same thing with SAP ERP. Am I missing something? Why is such a basic thing as a REST API for e-commerce not available for those systems?
Why develop using Python Django for the back-end and using React.js for the frontend. What is the right way to integrate them with the ERP system?
NetSuite does have a REST API and webservices. "you have to write a lot of logic using SuiteScript" is true but it's just JavaScript and there are many talented developers out there.
I'm not sure there is a "right way" but there are many ways to connect to the data.
My suggestion would be to contact a partner company, such as SWK Technologies. http://swktech.com
NetSuite has two main APIs, SuiteTalk and SuiteScript.
SuiteTalk is the Web Services API, which is SOAP based and allows for pulling data from and updating NetSuite. The SuiteScript API is JavaScript based and allows you to customize accounts and export data at the appropriate event during your business process. The term "SuiteCloud" encompasses all APIs and integration tools.
As for documentation, this is mostly only available to clients and partners. If you have a client who provides you with access to their account, you will gain access to the NetSuite Help Center and all relevant documentation.
Your options for integrating with the e-commerce platform depends on the exact platform. This ranges from Webhooks to HTTP requests.
You can't say NetSuite is delimiting developers in any way. It depends on how you look at it. As I see it, NetSuite provides two main method for developers - SuiteTalk and SuiteScript.By this, developer can create his/her own API, define what kind of acces those API should have.
SuiteTalk is SOAP based.
I would suggest using SuiteScript to create your own API using either NS RESTlet or NS Suitelet.
They have the feature for External URL. By sending request to this external URL you can trigger your own custom functions written on the SuiteScript. By SuiteScript, you can create your own API and define your own function. Ie, developer is in full control.
The only problem I see with NetSuite is its higher barrier for entry. There is no way you can access NetSuite Help Centre without having a Client/Partner/Test account.
But obviously, those who need some kind of integration with NetSuite have NS account.
Related
Has anyone used Smartsheet API to capture payment data?
I work with a Property Management group that will be accepting applications via Smartsheet's web form. Those applications require a deposit. My city uses NIC Inc. (EGOV) as their payment gateway. Apparently there are a couple of reports (one daily, one # each transaction) that will give us all the information about the payments but it would be best if Smartsheet could collect the information automatically.
I am very new to coding but I have good resources to call on to implement suggestions.
It's certainly possible to write data to your sheet using the Smartsheet API (we even have a Python SDK to help with that).
Your next step should be to determine whether the eGov API supports the exporting of the data that you want to bring into Smartsheet.
Assuming both APIs do what you need, then the person writing the scripts can automate them by using a cron job or a webhook (if eGov API supports it).
I failed to get approval for my application that I started to write against the TradeMe API. My API access was not approved. I'm therefore looking for alternatives.
Any NZ property for sale APIs out there? I have seen realestate.co.nz which according to the github repo, might provide something in PHP and Ruby, but the Ruby repo hasn't been touched in several years. Google API perhaps?
I'm specifically interested in obtaining geo-location information for the properties on sale.
The sandbox should let you access trademe without the need to access the main server.
realestate.co.nz seems to have both Javascript and Ruby APIs. I'm going to investigate the possibility of building a Python port as their code is on github/realestate.co.nz
I have no financial interest in either TradeMe or realestate.co.nz, for the record. Just a guy trying to avoid screen scraping.
I was going through googles's api python-client-library and google analytics api . I was able to do all steps mentioned in official docs but then I got some doubts. Since I've never done this kind of thing before, so I need your valuable suggestions/tips.
My Goal:
Want to design a web application in Python(using django/flask) and google-api-python-client. I have few matrices(coming from my web ecommerce product that is using GA.) and I'm not sure if google analytics dashboard by default support at that deep level. so I will use Google's analytic api to customize data according to my need and show in my analytic web app(which can be accessed by any one).
Doubts/Queries:
1) first of all which reporting api I would be needing for this mentioned here. core api or metadata api?
2) while I was setting up the project and client key, I chose 2nd option(OAuth 2.0 client ID)
is that ok or should I chose service account? once I selected 2nd options there were couple of radio buttons(web, android, ios, other, etc.) I chose other or should I chose web?
3) once i chose other option from radio button list, I executed my script and it prompt a browser to ask for permission, I allowed. here my question is if I put my application on production would there not be any browser, what would happen in that case?
I would really appreciate if you can help me in these queries, sorry for long question, this is my first question.
PS: Bottom line is how one should structure and develop there analytic web application in general.
The key thing to understand is that Google Analytics is an authenticated API. It is designed make it easy to allow the end user to access their own data. It is designed to be hard to allow the end user to access data they do not own.
If you are building a web application to allow your users to access their own private data It is recommended that you use a client side authentication method, such as in this example or this example.
If you are trying to build a web application that shares your private data with your users there are a few ways to go about it:
You could collect the data server side in python using a service account (note you will have to add the service account the GA account you wish it to have access).
You can take a hybrid approach and have a service account generate an access token and use the embed api to actually make the query.
In the end I would encourage you to spend some time to read Using OAuth 2.0 to Access Google APIs, and understand senarios descussed and ask yourself which of these senerios will work best for my application.
Here is the situation:
We use Flask for a website application development.Also on the website sever, we host a RESTful service. And we use Flask-login for as the authentication tool, for BOTH the web application access and the RESTful service (access the Restful service from browsers).
Later, we find that we need to, also, access the RESTful from client calls (python), so NO session and cookies etc. This gives us a headache regarding the current authentication of the RESTful service.
On the web, there exist whole bunch of ways to secure the RESTful service from client calls. But it seems no easy way for them to live together with our current Flask-login tool, such that we do not need to change our web application a lot.
So here are the question:
Is there a easy way(framework) so the RESTful services can support multiple authentication methods(protocols) at the same time. Is this even a good practice?
Many thanks!
So, you've officially bumped into one of the most difficult questions in modern web development (in my humble opinion): web authentication.
Here's the theory behind it (I'll answer your question in a moment).
When you're building complicated apps with more than a few users, particularly if you're building apps that have both a website AND an API service, you're always going to bump into authentication issues no matter what you're doing.
The ideal way to solve these problems is to have an independent auth service on your network. Some sort of internal API that EXCLUSIVELY handles user creation, editing, and deletion. There are a number of benefits to doing this:
You have a single authentication source that all of your application components can use: your website can use it to log people in behind the scenes, your API service can use it to authenticate API requests, etc.
You have a single service which can smartly managing user caching -- it's pretty dangerous to implement user caching all over the place (which is what typically happens when you're dealing with multiple authentication methods: you might cache users for the API service, but fail to cache them with the website, stuff like this causes problems).
You have a single service which can be scaled INDEPENDENTLY of your other components. Think about it this way: what piece of application data is accessed more than any other? In most applications, it's the user data. For every request user data will be needed, and this puts a strain on your database / cache / whatever you're doing. Having a single service which manages users makes it a lot nicer for you to scale this part of the application stack easily.
Overall, authentication is really hard.
For the past two years I've been the CTO at OpenCNAM, and we had the same issue (a website and API service). For us to handle authentication properly, we ended up building an internal authentication service like described above, then using Flask-Login to handle authenticating users via the website, and a custom method to authenticate users via the API (just an HTTP call to our auth service).
This worked really well for us, and allowed us to scale from thousands of requests to billions (by isolating each component in our stack, and focusing on user auth as a separate service).
Now, I wouldn't recommend this for apps that are very simple, or apps that don't have many users, because it's more hassle than it's worth.
If you're looking for a third party solution, Stormpath looks pretty promising (just google it).
Anyhow, hope that helps! Good luck.
My friend has a website built using Pyramid framework and using MongoDB to store data. If I want to build an iPhone app, how do I access the data from that database?
I know Obj-C and have built simple, iOS apps, but none of them used non-local data. I've googled but no good result returned. I just don't know where to start. Any good tutorial or sample code on the related issue would be appreciated!!
As far as best practices go, you would not want to be accessing MongoDB (or any database) directly over the internet without appropriate security considerations.
The most straightforward option from iOS would probably be either add a RESTful interface to your own application, or use a third party hosted solution that provides an API. In either case I would recommend using https in addition to authentication, as the MongoDB wire protocol is not currently encrypted.
For iOS I would consider using the RestKit framework as a handy helper. It includes reasonable documentation and examples to get you started.