This might sound like a general question but I am learning AI techniques/algorithms to implement the best solution for my website to reply to my users. I want to reply to my users as most of their questions over the email are almost the same so I am not sure which algorithm to use to implement my mailbot.
I have been studying AIML and apparently it uses best pattern matches and respond with the predefined template thus very less capacity so self learn. Other than this I have started studying basic NLP which would tokenize, segment, and then create an answer based on that. Maybe I need some advice on where to look.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks.
I'd recommend Dialogflow for any chat bot applications. Not only does it make ml chat bots easily accessible and free (within a very generous free tier) but also allows you to leverage Google's models and infrastructure with very little development time and effort.
You can even get away with writing zero code, depending on your required integrations or backend.
Dialogflow also allows you to easily implement multiple languages and deploy to many platforms with little in terms of manual work.
It'll be a little more effort than keyword matching but will be a lot more versatile and you'll learn a lot more about intents, context and ml chat bots.
For you to deploy via email you'll want to integrate the API which should be very simple once you have a model configured.
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There are must be a lot of apps that are designed to communicate with server. My question is only about App installed on iOS device + Server side service interaction. Web app is not what I am talking about, and there should be no webpage involved in this discussion at all. Typical examples are Apps like Instagram and Twitter, in which most of the information exchanged between the App and the server is just data like String, Image and Integers(wrapped in JSON or XML), no webpage presentation needed.
My question will be: if you are an independent app developer, and you are designing such an app from scratch without any existing website API, database structure or application(so you are not limited by any existing API or database structure or application protocol), What will be the most efficient approach?
What the sever side need to do are:
receive data send by the App;
process the data with designed logic;
interact with database(like MySQL);
do necessary data mining and analysis---this could be a constantly running service or one time task requested by the App client;
send the data back to the App upon request or spontaneously;
exchange or broadcast the data between/among different App clients (i.e.: group chatroom and peer to peer message);
As far I as know there are 3 obvious options to implement the server side:
PHP
Python
Ruby on Rails
(please feel free to add more options)
My questions are:
which one is the most appropriate choice to implement the server side?
If the App is focusing intensively on natural human language/text searching, analyzing and data mining, which one is the best choice? I heard Python is doing pretty good in this area.
Any advice on the database choices? I am using MySQL for now, and I found it's quite powerful for my purposes, I heard Twitter is switching to Cassandra. Will that be too difficult to start with?
For the server end, if you need to build a Server management interface, for you as an admin to manage and monitor the community, membership, data and such, is there any existing solution, or framework or tool for that? what will be the most efficient approach?
If a new programmer has no experience in non of them, which one you suggest he/she to start with?
Is there any good reference material or sample code on the server side in such context we can learn from?
I know there are a lot of very experienced experts on these areas on Stackoverflow, but I saw more newbies who just entered the iOS developing area without much knowledge in server/database programming experience. And I hope this thread can help these who are thinking to design an App with server/client structure but have no idea where to start with.
ps: I will keep updating this question thread and adding my findings on this topic, to help all other users at stackoverflow. :-) Please try to make your answer informative, easy to understand, and constructive. I guess most of readers for this thread will be new members of this great community.
Are you sure you want to spend time & money to develop your own Server & develop your own API?
There are lots of mBaaS (mobile Backend as a Service) providers today such QuickBlox, Parse,StackMob, which are ready to use and they have great Custom Objects API and some of predefined modules. They have great free plans with big quota. Some of them such QuickBlox has Enterprise plan - so you can buy license and they server team update server for you purpose.
So, i recommend not develop your server and think about mBaaS market.
Just about your issue - I can recommend look at QuickBlox Custom Objects code sample and also Custom Objects API. Custom Objects module provides flexibility to define any data structure(schema) you need. Schema is defined in Administration Panel. The schema is called Class and contains field names and their type. I think it's what you need.
which one is the most appropriate choice to implement the server
side?
Well that depends on what you know, there is reason to choice one of the other
If the App is focusing intensively on natural human language/text
searching, analyzing and data mining, which one is the best choice? I
heard Python is doing pretty good in this area.
This would reflect on your first question, you pick the language on you needs. Thus if python makes it easier then pick that one.
Any advice on the database choices? I am using MySQL for now, and I
found it's quite powerful for my purposes, I heard Twitter is
switching to Cassandra. Will that be too difficult to start with?
Again not one that is easy to answer, since it all has to do with requirements. But any SQL server will do. Cassandra is meant for "scalability and high availability without compromising performance" accourding to there website. Do you think you webservice will get many request then it might be a choice to consider.
For the server end, if you need to build a Server management
interface, for you as an admin to manage and monitor the community,
membership, data and such, is there any existing solution, or
framework or tool for that? what will be the most efficient approach?
This again is only going to be answered when you pick the a SQL server and server language.
If a new programmer has no experience in non of them, which one you
suggest he/she to start with?
Start with something simpler, you are really going out on a limb here.
Is there any good reference material or sample code on the server
side in such context we can learn from?
Propably there is some, but you should really start small and work from there.
Twitter started out as a Rub on Rails app and is working on scalability and availability which ruby is not really good ar (that is my person opinion). or Look at facebook they have written a php to c compiler to make php run faster.
The only thing I can say to start code, when you app does take off then tackle the some of the performance issues.
And since you state that you are new to programming do not bite of more then you can chew.
This is a huge question and I don't think there is a best answer. It most depends on what you care about, such as how quickly the development process, how easily the implementation, etc.
And which one is popular, which one is cool, I don't think it make really sense.
In my personal opinion, I'm good at ASP.NET and I can get Windows server easily, so I'll start with an ASP.NET service to provides data.
And, to be continued.
Im currently working on an iphone app project. The app is based on a simple chat function between 2 or more people who have registered to the app. Iv outsourced the project. The developers working on the project would like to use Smartfox servers for the Client and Server side communication. They said its easier to manage and setup and is more efficient.
However Im not sure what the disadvantages are of using the Smartfox framework and whether I should just ask them to develop/code the client and server communication rather than using this framework.
Please let me have your suggestions on this issue.
Thank you
The usual response is: it depends on your budget, your time and needs.
If you just want to make a chat without advanced features, you may make it yourself. I tell "may" because if already made solutions exist why reinvented the wheel?! (except for the price).
However if you envisage to have a lot of users, some cool features or other you should consider a third solution (like Smartfoxserver, Electroserver, or other). They provide robust solutions with a good documentation. Moreover they offered a tons of features, new one appear regularly, there are updated, etc. Below a small non-exhaustive list of pros and cons of using Smartfox rather than a homemade solution, in my opinion:
Advantages compared with a homemade solution:
Gain time
Robust solution
Performance
Multi-platform
Scalability (in time and concurrent users)
Deployment
Network engine fully functional (TCP/UDP, HTTP Tunneling, etc.)
Low learning curve
Low maintenance costs
Tons of features (in your case Buddy Lists, Moderation, Filters, etc.)
etc.
Disadvantages:
Price (for > 100 CCU) (it takes a long time to develop a homemade solution though + maintenance cost)
Many features that you will not use
I hope it'll help you in your reflection.
I am trying to write a iPhone group chatting/message-board app which will have a backend component. I expect users to register with our system and start posting messages on chatrooms/message-boards. These message-boards can have more than 2 individuals, must support real time notifications and should be accessible from any other clients (like web) as well.
I stumbled upon http://code.google.com/p/xmppframework/ . I realize that XMPP is a very attractive proposition for our needs but I am seriously worried about the infrastructure complexities and scale issues. Besides, XMPP has way too much to offer for my needs. Looks like, XMPP might be the only choice for my pleasure in pain, but I wanted to see what you experts have to say on this.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
My advice is: whichever protocol you're choosing, do not try to invent your own protocol. Go for XMPP or if you can find an alternative which you find more compelling, use that. Especially if there's already a nice framework for you to use. Why ? Because a single developer new to a field is seldom smarter than a bunch of people with experience ;-) Make use of other peoples' experience by using an established protocol, and make use of existing frameworks to avoid coding mistakes and investing a lot of time to solve a problem yet again that was already solved.
That being said, XMPP is widely deployed and thus would make for a good choice if you later plan to write additional clients for other platforms or want to have third-party clients connect to your server.
I am interested in extending my website to provide a service which involves users "check in" in my university's campus. Since Location Based Services (LBS) is pretty new, and there are not much literature around that could provide relevant interests to this matter, I have the following questions to ask:
First, I know that I have to design an Android App and possibly an phone app application. For all I am guessing, foursquare is simply using the client to send data to their webserver back and forth.
What are the standard protocols for the client to communicate with the webserver? (or is it simply just json or xml?)
What kind of special web service do they use on their backend? (Like some research would reveal they are using LIFT, written in Scala which is something that I am not familiar with.).
I know python pretty well. Are there webservers, i.e. django or pylons, that provide similar service to 2) above?
How difficult is this really?
Also, any literature on this subject matter is greatly appreciated.
Use the foursquare API.
They have pre-made libraries for both Django and Python here, those should make it easier to integrate foursquare into your website.
Well, I do think a good first step would be to look at Foursquare's API, both to see if you can simply integrate with their service (i.e. look for check-ins that are to campus buildings or whatever) or just to get a picture of what they're using. Their API seems like a pretty standard web service using XML or JSON, which seems like a good practice for you as well.
There are some challenges in building a scalable web service that will handle geographic data: you'd want a database that can handle geospatial indexing for you (otherwise the algorithms can get a little complex). If you're familiar with Django, GeoDjango might be a good fit for you. I hear that Foursquare is actually switching to use MongoDB, which has some geospatial indexing features: they're likely using a NoSQL database because of their unique scaling issues which you probably don't need to worry about.
Mimicking foursquare isn't a good approach. A solution to your specific functionality needs and load levels will always be custom, not copied. Even the biggest university campus in the world, with every single person using the service, you'd be totally dwarfed by foursquare's user base. So whatever they're doing is WAY higher-end than what you need.
For your purposes, a simple web service is probably more than adequate. I'm building apps that are location-sensitive (arts/cultural events and consumer offers local to the user's current position) right now that hit PHP scripts with query string or posted-data arguments, and consume JSON. Nothing fancy, but I can handle the load on the server side with lightweight technologies I already know, and I know it'll scale to meet my actual load.
Don't be beholden to the way somebody else does it, even if they are the industry leader. Their needs aren't your needs.
I was today trying to figure out on working with WebService and found many articles really gospel over the Web Service and its effectiveness in the Market share.
My Questions are:
For a Complex project of critical data, is it better to opt for WebService?
What Makes WebService different from other way of fetching the data?
The answer is... it depends. Web services are not really the next Big thing, they have been a Huge Thing for years now. In business applications, web services allow a big level of interoperability and capabilities never seen before.
They help integration with legacy systems, cooperation between distinct departments, defining loosely coupled interfaces and such. You should read some about Service-oriented architecture.
If all you need is a PHP application that handles data from a single database, you might not need web services at all. If you are designing a solution that revolves around multiple data sources, with complex security involved, multiple languages and/or multiple applications, then web services become essential.
SOAP is a protocol; if working with PHP, you'll need to check out the PHP: SOAP guide to understand how it works. For every language (almost), there are existing APIs to develop web services. Anyhow you might want to check RESTful web services instead of SOAP-based ones, they are generally simpler to implement/understand. But that's another debate ;-).
Cheers.
That mostly depends on the definition of "big thing".
My experience with the WS stack and SOAP and all the acronym soup is that it takes an awful lot of workforce to deploy it. The status of the frameworks is complex, and definitely not something a hobbyist can put to work in a couple of afternoons. We have seen how many things on the net became the next big thing just because they were easy. Easy to understand, easy to interact with, easy in technology. Wikipedia, twitter, digg, youtube are internet big things, and they are, from the interaction point of view, light years away from SOAP/WS based interaction. They are KISS: simple and stupid. A whole horizontal market was opened just because of their simplicity. Even multiprocessing platforms like BOINC don't use anything near the WS stack, but they are the core of many high-throughput efforts.
Now, if you have to deal with complex multi-host transactions, authentication, credential delegation, caching... WS is there. It's the target that makes the need: banks, flight reservation, stuff like this. but they won't impact the common programmer. They require too much energy and too many different competences at once to become something usable for a horizontal market of developers.
Also, I am a REST person. I never advocated SOAP with much emphasis, but there was nothing else and it was a better evolution over XMLRPC (which, if you have to perform dumb RPC, IMHO it's still a good choice). Now I changed my mind. You mostly have resources on the web, and you interact with them with HTTP methods. SOAP is nothing but RPC on hypersteroids. No, REST is not the solution that replaces WS. At all. it's simply easier to use and to debug, albeit more difficult to design (you have to think in terms of resources instead of method calls). It's KISS. That's why it has more chances for success on the horizontal market.
It depends.
Web services can be useful if you need to expose the data across security boundaries, where a direct connection to an RDBMS would be a bad idea.
Popular method for implementing web services nowdays is to use RESTful API (eg. via Ajax/JSON). It's already "next big thing" – almost every major player has been offering it for years. Google, Flickr, Twitter, you name it.
The big advantage is that they help to implement an API layer.
If you implement your solution using a "bus" where the web services sit, it opens up your product to a far greater range of users and moves away from being a proprietary product.
It also enables people to interface using a wide range of solutions e.g web service clients can be implemented using command line, Jsp, Java, Asp, .NET, PHP etc.
They also enable code re-use e.g. if you implement GetClientDetails (ID) as a web service for one user, when the next group comes along wanting the same thing, all you have to do is give them the WSDL and they are away.