I know some basic programming languages but im new at using API's.
Can someone please explain how, or where do i run my API's codes?
Will the API's be run on the website i'm trying to get my data from or can it be run on a client or from another different running environment or platform?
Apis should only (I say "should" because I am not sure that something like this can be done on the client side) to run on the server.
when you get information from an api you are not executing it on the client. you are only getting the data you requested for the endpoints you used.
Do you plan to use REST APIs as a consumer or producer? That is, do you want to expose your data, systems and processes as resources for an end consumer, or do you want to be the consumer creating applications that leverage services?
The Producer
To produce REST APIs, you'll need to run your API providers using a web server. Just about any web server will do, so long as it can map resource paths to functions. Some common ones are:
Node.JS with Express.js
Nginx with Python/Flask
Java using Spring
You should be able to run whatever you chose on nearly any hosting provider, cloud VM or wherever else you usually run websites.
The Consumer
You can use Rest APIs anywhere you have network connectivity. You'll find this commonly in mobile applications, web applications, IoT devices, etc where data are combined from multiple providers on to a single application for end users. The key feature as a consumer you'll be looking for is a directory of API providers from which you can build your application.
ProgrammableWeb maintains one such list.
There are 2 applications that need to communicate with each other. They are both running on the same PC.
Main Application (C#)
Helper Application (C#) -> launched from Main Application
Helper Application will modify some data used/contained by the Main Application. Can the helper application be a microservice? (not familiar with microservices, but I've saw this while checking on the net)
I found a helpful tutorial and was able to create a WCF Duplex Binding.
Now the Main Application and Helper Application can communicate.
I'm just wondering if this is a good solution (or a microservice is better??)
Can the helper application be a microservice? (not familiar with microservices...
Sure. "Microservices" is just the latest term that describes distributed component-based network computing. It goes back a long way to the days of (and possibly further) distributed COM (DCOM) and Corba; COM+ and finally service-orientated architecture (SOA). WCF used SOA as a best practice. In practice the only real difference between SOA and microservices is that the latter tend to adopt HTTP-REST-JSON as the transport/API/payload whereas the SOA generation is transport/payload neutral but generally using SOAP.
I found a helpful tutorial and was able to create a WCF Duplex Binding. Now the Main Application and Helper Application can communicate. I'm just wondering if this is a good solution (or a microservice is better??)
Well technically you are already using microservice/SOA.
I'm just wondering if this is a good solution
No. The problem with SOA/microservices on the same machine is that they are very chatty; have a high overhead; and their message payloads quite verbose. Both SOAP and REST utilise text messages (XML and JSON respectively) by default (which is large compared to binary).
If both client and server are on the same machine you are best to just use straight-up named-pipes and avoid WCF/REST. Communcation under named-pipes are binary and so are very compact; named pipes run in Kernal mode meaning it is very fast and as an added bonus when communicating locally, bypasses the network layer (as opposed to say TCP which will even for LOCALHOST).
In my next planned project I suppose to implement an online classroom website in which I want to share a black board (Say a simple text area) among the Tutor and the participating online students {These all are logined through the website}. Whatever the text Tutor writes over the Black board has to be seen by the other participants in Real-time.
I want to use Java as my development platform.
To implement this I started googling on PUSH technology. I read that XMPP implementation servers and XMPP libraries can be used to implement near-realtime applications like collaberative applications/mutiparty games/IM applications etc.,
But I also read about BlazeDS usage for real-time and low-lattency web applications.
My questions are,
what is the difference among these XMPP java based implementation and BlazeDS? Is not both the techs final goal is to achieve low-lattency web apps using PUSH technology?
What is the difference among Comet servers and XMPP Servers? Do they just differ in the way they implement the PUSH technology or any thing else?
I am confused. Please someone explain me these little more so that I will know what I do before I do the things and where to start on next in my project.
Thanks
To answer your first question: No, XMPP's goal is not simply to "achieve low-latency web apps using PUSH technology". XMPP far pre-dates the "realtime web", and is a much more extensive platform than basic comet/push servers.
Features in XMPP that won't typically be in plain push servers include:
Support for non-web clients (including existing desktop clients)
A choice of authentication methods from strong credential-based mechanisms such as SCRAM-SHA-1 to temporary anonymous accounts
Support for federation (communication with other XMPP servers)
Lots of chat-centric capabilities available (contact lists, offline messaging, file transfers) - this can be a bonus or worthless, but most features like these can be disabled in some XMPP servers.
If you are just looking for a component to push messages to website visitors in realtime, and you're using Java which BlazeDS integrates tightly with, then BlazeDS is probably your best choice.
If your push system is part of a larger realtime platform which may involve multiple clients (including non-web for example), multiple languages, and even possibly multiple servers (e.g. you could allow users to use existing XMPP accounts to receive updates) then XMPP is more than likely worth looking into.
With Pusher and Beacon push cloud services I can get live updates in all browsers. Even implement chat functionality.
Can't these cloud services replace the need of me learning XMPP/AMQP/Websockets/Comet to implement the same kind of live updates/feeds?
These services offer Infrastructure as a Service so that you don't have to worry about the underlying technology. That said the services do use the technology as a selling point e.g. Pusher very much use WebSockets to sell their service.
As well as Pusher there are similar services so I'd recommend checking out the real-time tech guide for others that haven't been mentioned (I work for Pusher).
Can't these cloud services replace the need of me learning XMPP/AMQP/Websockets/Comet to implement the same kind of live updates/feeds?
Yes. The point in these frameworks and services is to abstract away the underlying connection and protocols to provide you with a reasonable real-time communication pattern (simple messaging, pub-sub, evented pub-sub, RPC/RMI or DataSync) that works for the application functionality that you are looking to build.
I have heard a lot of people talking recently about middleware, but what is the exact definition of middleware? When I look into middleware, I find a lot of information and some definitions, but while reading these information and definitions, it seems that mostly all 'wares' are in the middle of something. So, are all things middleware?
Or do you have an example of a ware that isn't middleware?
Lets say your company makes 4 different products, your client has another 3 different products from another 3 different companies.
Someday the client thought, why don't we integrate all our systems into one huge system. Ten minutes later their IT department said that will take 2 years.
You (the wise developer) said, why don't we just integrate all the different systems and make them work together? The client manager staring at you... You continued, we will use a Middleware, we will study the Inputs/Outputs of all different systems, the resources they use and then choose an appropriate Middleware framework.
Still explaining to the non tech manager
With Middleware framework in the middle, the first system will produce X stuff, the system Y and Z would consume those outputs and so on.
Middleware is a terribly nebulous term. What is "middleware" in one case won't be in another. In general, you can expect something classed as middleware to have the following characteristics:
Primarily (usually exclusively) software; usually doesn't need any specialized hardware.
If it weren't there, applications that depend on it would have to incorporate it as part of their application and would experience a lot of duplication.
Almost certainly connects two applications and passes data between them.
You'll notice that this is pretty much the same definition as an operating system. So, for instance, a TCP/IP stack or caching could be considered middleware. But your OS could provide the same features, too. Indeed, middleware can be thought of like a special extension to an operating system, specific to a set of applications that depend on it. It just provides a higher-level service.
Some examples of middleware:
distributed cache
message queue
transaction monitor
packet rewriter
automated backup system
Wikipedia has a quite good explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleware
It starts with
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact.
What is Middleware gives a few examples.
There are (at least) three different definitions I'm aware of
in business computing, middleware is messaging and integration software between applications and services
in gaming, middleware is pretty well anything that is provided by a third-party
in (some) embedded software systems, middleware provides services that applications use, which are composed out of the functions provided by the hardware abstraction layer - it sits between the application layer and the hardware abstraction layer.
Simply put Middleware is a software component which provides services to integrate disparate systems together.
In an complex enterprise environment, there are a number of challenges when you need to integrate two or more enterprise systems together to talk to each other. Normally these systems do not understand each others language as they are developed on different platforms using different languages (like C++, Java, Cobol, etc.).
So here comes middleware software in picture which provides services like
transformation of messages formats from one app to other,
routing and enriching messages besides taking care of security,
encryption,
validation and
applying different business rules to these messages.
A typical example of middleware is an ESB products like IBM message broker (WMB/IIB), WESB, Datapower XI50, Oracle Fusion, Mule and many others.
Therefore, middleware sits mostly in between the service consuming apps and services provider apps and help these apps to talk to each other.
Middleware is about how our application responds to incoming requests. Middlewares look into the incoming request, and make decisions based on this request. We can build entire applications only using middlewares. For e.g. ASP.NET is a web framework comprising of following chief HTTP middleware components.
Exception/error handling
Static file server
Authentication
MVC
As shown in the above diagram, there are various middleware components in ASP.NET which receive the incoming request, and redirect it to a C# class (in this case a controller class).
Middleware is a general term for software that serves to "glue together" separate, often complex and already existing, programs. Some software components that are frequently connected with middleware include enterprise applications and Web services.
There is a common definition in web application development which is (and I'm making this wording up but it seems to fit): A component which is designed to modify an HTTP request and/or response but does not (usually) serve the response in its entirety, designed to be chained together to form a pipeline of behavioral changes during request processing.
Examples of tasks that are commonly implemented by middleware:
Gzip response compression
HTTP authentication
Request logging
The key point here is that none of these is fully responsible for responding to the client. Instead each changes the behavior in some way as part of the pipeline, leaving the actual response to come from something later in the sequence (pipeline).
Usually, the middlewares are run before some sort of "router", which examines the request (often the path) and calls the appropriate code to generate the response.
Personally, I hate the term "middleware" for its genericity but it is in common use.
Here is an additional explanation specifically applicable to Ruby on Rails.
Middleware stands between web applications and web services that natively can't communicate and often are written in different languages/frameworks.
One such example is OWIN middleware for .NET environment, before owin people were forced to host web apps in a microsoft hosting software called IIS. After owin was developed, it has added capacity to host both in IIS and self host, in IIS was just added support for Owin which acted as an interface. Also it become possible to host .NET web apps on Linux via Mono, which again added support for Owin.
It also added capacity to create Single Page Applications, Owin handling Http request/response context, so on top of owin you can add authentication/authorization logic via OAuth2 for example, you can configure middleware to register a class which contains logic of user authentification (for ex. OAuth2 implementation) or class which contains logic of how to manage http request/response messages, that way you can make one application communicate with other applications/services via different data format (like json, xml, etc if you are targeting web).
Some examples of middleware: CORBA, Remote Method Invocation (RMI),...
The examples mentioned above are all pieces of software allowing you to take care of communication between different processes (either running on the same machine or distributed over e.g. the internet).
From my own experience with webwork, a middleware was stuff between users (the web browser) and the backend database. It was the software that took stuff that users put in (example: orders for iPads, did some magical business logic, i.e. check if there are enough iPads available to fill the order) and updated the backend database to reflect those changes.
It is just a piece of software or a tool on which your application executes and rapplication capabilities with respect to high availability,scalability,integrating with other softwares or systems without you bothering about your application level code changes .
For example : The operating system on which your application runs requires an I.P change , you do not have to worry about it in your code , it is the middleware stack on which you can simple update the configuration.
Example 2 : You experience problems with your runtime memory allocation and feel that the your application usage has increased , you do not have to much about it unless you have a bug or bottleneck in your code , it is easily achievable by tuning middleware software configuration on which your application runs.
Example 3 : You have multiple disparate software and you need them to talk to each other or send data in a common format which is understandable by all the systems then this is where middleware systems comes handy.
Hope the information provided helps.
it is a software layer between the operating system
and applications on each side of a distributed computing system in a network. In fact it connects heterogeneous network and software systems.
If I am not wrong, in software application framework, based on the context, you can consider middleware for the following roles that can be combined in order to perform certain activities in between the user request and the application response.
Adapter
Sanitizer
Validator
I always thought of it as the oldest software I have had to install. The total app used a web server, a database server, and an application server. The web server being the middleware between the data and the app.