I intend to create an event management system, where users may login, view a list of events, sign up to volunteer at events, cancel registration, and view a calendar view of events of the day. In addition, users should receive emails, notifying them when the event(s) they have signed up for is coming up.
Primarily, it should be accessible through a browser, but I would like, in the future, for it to become an organization-wide iPad app.
I have a few questions. How should I store my data? Will MySQL be sufficient? Is it better if I sign up for a service like Heroku, Appfog, or GAE? If I don't need these services, would it be able to run if I used my shared hosting plan over at GoDaddy?
I was thinking about using Google Drive Spreadsheets to store data, and using Google's spreadsheet API to access and write to it. Are there any advantages or disadvantages of taking this route?
Only 50 or so people would need to access it.
I like Python, but haven't done much on the web. Is web2py a good idea, or is it overkill for my purposes?
For UI, I was leaning towards HTML + jQuery + AJAX? + Bootstrap.
Thanks!
I would recommend you to use Django, which is a macro framework written in Python to develop web applications.
Database is of your choice like mysq, postgresql or by default you can use the sqlite3 database offered by Django.
The same goes with UI. You can use the technologies like html, js, CSS, jQuery, bootstrap etc.
Hope this helps.
Related
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.
I am looking for a 'sanity check' before I start working on this, as I'm new to writing server-side code. I want to stick to Python if possible, since that's what I'm used to!
I have written a desktop app (wxPython) that allows offsite employees to record their working times, the results of which they currently email to the company. I want to be able to have them save data directly to an 'online' location, from which the company can get summary data.
From what I have read (mostly here on StackOverflow) leads me to think I should do the following:
Run a database on the server with local access only (I'm favouring RethinkDB...)
Write a Python server app that can access the database but only exposes the functionality needed per user. Probably with different ports for users, payroll, and admin (me). Secure the sockets with TLS.
Add code to the desktop app to access the server.
Is this a good approach, or am I reinventing wheels and should learn to use Django or some other web framework?
As Paulo Almeida suggested in the comments making a REST application you interface with your wxPython application is probably the way to go. For this django may be a solution but it is probably an overkill microframework such as web.py, flask or bottle is enough and more easier to grasp
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.
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 need to build a web site with the following features:
1) user forum where we expect light daily traffic
2) database backend for users to create profiles, where they can log in
and upload media (pictures)
3) users can uses their profile to buy content from an online inventory
4) create web pages, shopping carts etc for online inventory
5) secure online credit card processing
I am very familiar with python but not with python web frameworks. I do know
some SQL. How do I get started developing something like this? Is Django
a good alternative?
Not programming related per se: Where do you recommend I get web hosting with a domain
name for an application like this?
Django was made for this kind of thing. Check it out.
As far as hosting, djangofriendly.com is a great resource. I have used WebFaction before and I am absolutely in love with how easy it is to get Django going with them and with their excellent customer service. Very top notch for reasonable prices if you are going the shared hosting route.
If you are looking to speed up some of the tasks described, you should check out Pinax and Django Pluggables. Thanks to the way Django applications are setup it is trivially easy to plug an application into your project.
You can try Pylons lightweight web framework.
Your requirements make pinax sound like a library you might want to look into if you go the django route.
Google App Engine will provide hosting for free as well as Django and a db..