App Development

Integrating Web Applications with Apache

Andy Carlson — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:36:27 +0000

When you deploy a web application, how do end users access it? Often web applications are set behind a gateway device through which end users can access it. One of the popular products to act as an application gateway on Linux is the Apache Web Server. Although it can function as a normal web server, it also has the ability to connect through it to other web servers.

In this article, I discuss what it takes to integrate a web application into Apache. This includes integrating the HTTP protocol functionality, customizing content to render properly and reusing pieces of configuration. Once you understand those basic bits of functionality, you'll have the tools you need to maximize your web applications' usability. So, let's get started!

Crash Course in RegEx

A mechanism that I use throughout this article that might need a brief introduction is Regular Expressions (or regex). Regex is used to define a text pattern to search for within a URL or to find and replace text within content, such as HTML or JavaScript. The text processing command sed uses regex to do searches and substitutions.

For each example below there will be three parts: input, regex pattern and output. The pattern will be applied to the input text and determine the value of the output text.

Example 1:


Input:
  Name: Frank Sinatra
  Genre: Jazz
  Name: 2Pac
  Genre: Rap
  Name: Reel Big Fish
  Genre: Ska

Regex pattern: "^Name: "

Output:
  Name: Frank Sinatra
  Name: 2Pac
  Name: Reel Big Fish

This example searches the input text for text that matches the pattern "^Name: ". This pattern says, "Look for the text 'Name: ' at the beginning of each line." Since there are two lines that begin with that text, only those two lines are returned. While "^" represents the beginning of a line, "$" represents the end of a line. So if you were to apply the pattern "a$", two lines would be returned (Frank Sinatra and Ska). Let's expand on that example and use the input from Example 1 with a new pattern.

Example 2:


Regex pattern: "^Name: [0-9]"

Output:
  Name: 2Pac

As you can see, I've taken the original regex pattern and added [0-9] to the end. This will search for a single character that can be any number from 0 to 9, which is why "2Pac" was the only line returned. You also can specify a range with alphabetic characters ([a-z] or [A-Z]).

Along with pattern selection, you also can do substitution with regex. There are two formats for regex substitutions: s|pattern|replace|modifier or s/pattern/replace/modifier. In Apache, I find it easier to use the pipe-style substitution. Example 3 uses the same input with a new pattern.

Example 3:

Go to Full Article

Buddy Platform Limited's Parse on Buddy Service

James Gray — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 17:53:02 +0000

by James Gray

With Facebook's Parse mobile back end as a service shutting down, developers are in a bind. The vise is squeezing tighter since the open-source Parse Server product released by Facebook, asserts Buddy Platform Limited, was not designed to support high volume, commercial-grade apps from organizations seeking the breadth of the original platform.

To solve this issue and facilitate an easy migration path to a robust alternative, Buddy launched an enterprise-grade Parse service offering called Parse on Buddy. Parse on Buddy's developer says that its solution is closest to the original Parse service, including many features not part of the Parse Server codebase released to the Open Source community (for example, cloud code, multiple apps per account support, PPNS, file storage and more).

Parse on Buddy was designed to be as familiar to developers as possible, right down to using the same pricing model. It also features an easy three-step migration process for apps still on the original Parse service that requires only a small change to a mobile app's codebase and no remapping of APIs or other new code.

Go to Full Article

VMware's Clarity Design System

James Gray — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 17:56:05 +0000

by James Gray

By combining user experience (UX) guidelines and patterns with the front-end code in one solution, VMware's Clarity Design System represents a new concept in the design systems space. Clarity Design System is VMware's open-source project—"designed by designers and built by developers"—that unites UX, HTML/CSS and Angular for creating cohesive experiences for any application.

VMware began building Clarity based on readily apparent needs for an internal design system that unified VMware's portfolio of products and accelerated product development through reusable components. Building alongside product teams, the Clarity team was able to tackle the complexities of enterprise use cases while striving for simplicity familiar to consumer applications. Now dozens of VMware product teams have adopted Clarity internally in their work.

Go to Full Article

Non-Linux FOSS: Chrome, for One

Shawn Powers — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 15:20:20 +0000

by Shawn Powers

When I use OS X, I really like the Fluid app for making standalone Web applications. The problem is, Fluid isn't free unless you want the basic version. I don't mind paying for an application (and I did pay for Fluid), but it seems like something as simple as a single site browser shouldn't be something that costs money.

Thankfully, the folks at Epichrome feel the same way. They've created an open-source project at GitHub that allows you to create standalone OS X applications that use Chrome in order to provide a single site browser.

You can customize the way the app looks, give it a custom app icon and even register it as a browser on the system, so you can have it open when clicking on a specific Web site from inside your Web browser. I personally use it for my BirdCam, but it's a great way to turn any Web site into an "app" that you can launch from your dock.

Go to Full Article

Rogue Wave Software's Zend Server

James Gray — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 18:13:11 +0000

by James Gray

The CTO at Rogue Wave Software, Zeev Suraski, says he's never seen anything like PHP 7 in the software space—namely the halving of hardware needs after a mostly painless software upgrade. Organizations salivating to leverage this massive performance gain would be wise to investigate Zend Server 9, an application server that builds on the benefits of PHP 7, both on-premises and in the cloud.

This new version of Zend Server also offers code tracing and black box recording, making it an effortless process to perform root-cause analysis. Another key feature is Z-Ray, a developer toolkit that accelerates developer productivity by displaying all of the under-the-hood details of a page request across all the PHP scripts involved in building a page. Finally, with Zend Server 9, Rogue Wave introduces Zend Server Professional Plus and Zend Server Enterprise Plus editions that offer customers expert support for the open-source stack underlying the Zend Server-hosted PHP application.

Go to Full Article

LiveCode Ltd.'s LiveCode

James Gray — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 17:55:00 +0000

by James Gray

"Everyone Can Code" is the vision that its maker has for LiveCode, a highly productive coding environment for Linux, Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Server platforms. LiveCode Ltd. spent three years and weathered a $750,000 Kickstarter to enable a LiveCode rewrite from the ground up. The result is LiveCode 8, which adds a new plug-in architecture that allows users to drag/drop widgets containing sophisticated functionality. Widgets can be built within the LiveCode platform and used to wrap functionality in external libraries or each of the operating systems LiveCode supports.

The new features in LiveCode 8 are intended to empower a new audience of app makers. Some of these include nine pre-made widgets, 46 new extensions, the all new LiveCode Builder language, a 3.5x performance boost, Script Only stacks for better version control and working in teams, LiveCode for HTML5 and a new Feature Exchange for community funding of new features, among others.

Go to Full Article

Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK

James Gray — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 01:35:14 +0000

by James Gray

What's slick about Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK is that just a few lines of code from scratch are required instead of potentially hundreds of them, which could save months of development time. The updated Barcode Reader SDK 4.2, which adds Linux PHP support, allows application developers to embed functionality for decoding linear and 2D barcodes into Web or desktop applications almost instantly, significantly reducing development costs and costs of long-term application support.

Barcode recognition is enabled from image files, scanned images and from images captured on Webcams or smartphones. The new PHP barcode reader toolkit for Linux supports PHP x64 versions 5.3–5.6. Both Thread Safe and Non Thread Safe options are provided. The Dynamsoft toolkit works with Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS. Support for Web applications in ASP.NET, in C# or VB.NET, and PHP on Windows also is included, just in case.

Go to Full Article