I have been asked to oversee the development of a handful of sites. The people running the show want it so that if you sign onto one of the sites, then you are automatically signed onto the rest of them.
One of my buddies who is a great programmer says there is no safe way to do this, is he right?
I had an idea that the main site (parent site) could host the daughter sites as sub domains, with each site having its own unique domain name.
What do you think?
Yes, it can be done. However, it won't be a trivial solution but will be a very expensive project that requires an extensive set of skills. Companies typically try to achieve this by establishing internal solutions themselves but tend to fail as complexity increases.
What you are trying to accomplished can also be done as a service. You may want to take a look at the following webpage:
http://www.covisint.com/web/guest/about-identity-services
Hope that helps!
Related
I'm using swift — and the app needs to send a photo and matching text (that a user submits) to a server so that I can download the photo/text.
Would an existing FTP server that I have setup for my website be possible for this application? Or would it make more sense to do something with a web portal?
During my research, I'm finding options like Backendless, Alamofire, Gold Racoon, and various others. They seem like overkill for the simple task I'm looking to accomplish. Is there some minimal service out there that can automate my simple need? If not, which of these options would you recommend for my situation?
Ideally the setup would be free, but I'd be willing to spend up to $100 or $10/month if the service fits.
I'm new to app development so I'm feeling overwhelmed with the options and not sure how to begin researching. I hope beginner questions aren't frowned upon here — I would really appreciate any advise on what I should begin learning to achieve my goal of sending a photo+text from an iOS app to a place where I can access them.
If there are other questions I should be asking to achieve this, please let me know.
For your case there are two main routes to consider
1. BYOS (Bring Your Own Server)
With this option, you are responsible for creating and maintenance of your own server.
Now you can use various services such as Digital Ocean and Amazon for this.
On top of this, you would be responsible for creating your own database and maintaining it as well. Plus, you would need to write server side code along with client side code (the app) in order to instantiate communication between the two.
The advantage of this is that you virtually have control of everything but I think it is pretty clear how painful this task is.
2: BAS (Backend As a Service) Highly recommended
With this route, you simply have to write the app and let another service handle the server side of things. One of the most common ones is Firebase. Most folks including startups go down this route.
There are a bunch of other services out there.
Two Cents:
Whatever option or service you decide to use, I would recommend you make sure that:
a. The service has a good track record.
You do not want something that might end up getting shutdown in the next couple months. I know it is hard to predict this but certain initial guesses/probabilities can be made.
b. Make sure its community is vibrant.
The last thing you as a newbie wants is to be stuck and have no one to help you. Research around and see the different questions people ask and whether or not answers exist.
We are currently using a third party Drupal distribution that is locked down due to contractual agreement.
What is the best way for us to add forms to our site that will post to a web service?
Options we considered are:
Deploy another open distribution (core) that we can add forms to and link from the third party site.
Paying the vendor to create the form for us on that distribution (expensive, long lead time).
Any other options?
It's hard to say without actually knowing the details of your contractual agreement.
With drupal a distribution is a set of modules and configuration that lies in the profiles subdirectory of your drupal file system.
So you can add additional modules outside of that by adding them to the sites/all/modules directory.
That way they are not actually part of the distribution but you can still use them.
So for example you can add a custom module that has the forms & web service posting to sites/all/modules and it won't impact the distribution at all.
However if your contract says something like you cannot modify your drupal site/configuration at all then I think you're pretty stuck in a crappy contract.
If you are in a contract where it is expensive & takes a long time to do something that sounds relatively straight forward (again I don't know the details but a form that submits to a web service is generally pretty straight forward) but you aren't allowed to go outside of them to do the work you're in trouble.
Deploying another site just for a form or a couple of forms doesn't really sound like a good idea.
If they belong on the existing site they should be part of the existing site.
If the contract really does exclude you from adding your own code to the site at all it comes down to discussing it with your website provider.
Surely if you aren't allowed to modify the site then there should be a clause that covers you in the case that they don't complete work in a timely fashion.
I'm trying to figure out how to make an iPhone application allow multiple users (that have it installed) share data among them. Now, the tricky part is that I don't want to host a server at my place (very poor ISP services), so I would opt for an online hosting solution. Next, by data I understand them to be able to, let's say, post a comment that would become readable to all the other users and to see what other users have said.
So, in my mind, I'm thinking of either having a file remotely hosted that could be accessed by multiple users at the same time, or a database of some sort or anything like that.
You haven't given us much to go on -- it's not even clear what your question is. If you're just asking how to go about this, I'd suggest the following steps:
Figure out what, specifically, you want the app to do, what data it will share, and who the data will be shared with. Is this an app that you're going to distribute publicly? Will all users share the same data, or will groups of users share with each other but not outside the group? How big is the data, and how is it structured? Can any part of the data change at any time (like a shared document) or will the data just be updated (like a SMS conversation)?
Decide how you want to host the data. If you'll need to serve a lot of users, you'll want some sort of database. If you'll need to serve a LOT of users, you'll want to make sure that your solution will scale easily. There are lots of hosting companies that provide access to databases like Oracle or MySQL, and that may be enough for your purposes. Or, you might want to look into some of the web services options, such as those offered by Google and Amazon. These can be fairly easy to use and have the advantage that they'll scale very well.
Get to work. You'll probably want to build a very basic version of your app around the same time that you're getting the server side working, so that it's easier to test. Once the server side is working and reliable, you can shift the focus back to building out the rest of your app.
Just looking for some help/suggestions with this. I require my own server for an upcoming project that will be hosting users websites. I want to build a control panel the user can log into and modify their website which will be stored elsewhere on the server. This all seems easy enough, It's just managing domains and emails that confuse me.
What should I look for to manage domain names and point them to the correct website and also what would be the best way to manage email accounts/set up new ones etc. I want to avoid cPanel/WHM if possible, I'm looking to control most things through the control panel I will be building. So any suggestions on this would be useful as well, as I will be wanting to add email accounts through php (Can be done using a shell I assume?).
I will also be wanting to measure bandwidth used on the websites contained in each users directory, any suggestions on making this possible?
I'm really looking for some suggestions on what software to use to set this up, any advice would be really helpful!
Thanks,
Graeme
It sounds like you've got a lot of creative room. May I suggest a web framework? Django. With it you can build out a nice control panel, it's template system is clean and concise. It's also based on Python and thats why I suggest it. If there is a python module for it, you can use it in Django... so things like altering, creating, etc. local data/files is a breeze. you simply us Python (you can even forget it's "django"), crunch your data and then spit it out (into django... out to templates.. to display to the user).
You'll likely want AJAXY biznazz, their is a nice Django App for that, Dajax. Django has a rich and helpful community and tons of resources. Just hop on GitHub.com and search for Django, You'll find tons of stuff.
Im building a DNS Control Panel with it. Which sounds like a minimal version of what you're doing.
Since I'm not a huge fan of any of the current solutions for managing the resources and knowledge that I have, I was thinking about making my own solution, which will involve custom code as well as possible integration of FOSS solutions. I would start development on my local machine, but if I like it, how difficult would it be to migrate over to a public server and let others also use this tool? What kinds of challenges might I be facing?
In theory, nothing, beyond just the process of moving stuff to the new machine. You can set up your own servers, on your own ports (port 80 for example).
You can even create your own fake domain at home, with just a tweak to the /etc/hosts files (or the equivalent on Windows).
Now, if you're developing on Windows and hosting on unix, you'll have platform issues, so I'd suggest against that, at least for a first project.
But other than that, it should be straightforward.
You didn't hard code any paths to "localhost" did you? If so, that should be the first thing to strip out. Either use relative paths, or have a configurable {AppPath} variable of some kind that you only need ever change once.
By the way, what language/framework are you using? it would help us provide sample code.
I would add that documentation is a highly important factor in any project if it is to be quickly embraced by the public. The tendency when developing in-house projects, especially if they are just for your own personal use, is to neglect, or even completely ignore documentation of all kinds, both of usage, as well as in the code. If users aren't told how to use the product, they wont use it, and if other potential developers don't know how or why things are done the way they are, or what the purpose of things are, they either won't bother with trying, or will cause other problems unintentionally.