I wrote a simple web server that takes the public link to a google document containing image urls and names and outputs a print-friendly HTML photo directory with its contents.
I created it for a volunteer organization that I will no longer be able to stay involved in. I need to pass on the ability to generate that directory to my successor.
I'm not confident that I can trust myself to maintain that web application for the long term the organization needs. I'm hoping that instead I can change it to a self contained program, that members of the org could email around to whoever needed to generate the directory.
My first thought was to make a .html file the could open in a browser but I can't download the CSV data from google with Ajax, because it is cross domain. After googling there doesn't seem to be a way around this.
Is there a straightforward framework? I would guess I could do it with Adobe AIR, but I'd prefer something that simply removed the cross domain security feature.
I could take the time to embed a UIWebView into a Mac app, but since I want to write the app primarily in HTML, I'd have to create a bridge to let the web view make a cross domain request anyway right? Also it's not cross platform.
Any other ideas? How can I package my app as a desktop application instead of a web service?
You can get around the cross domain XHR using flash. CrossXhr can do it from apps served by regular http servers. I've never tried it with a static, file-served webapp. Follow the instructions here:
http://code.google.com/p/crossxhr/wiki/CrossXhr
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I am a complete Google Analytics beginner and would appreciate a help with a basic question.
I am developing HTML, CSS and JavaScript based applications which are further uploaded into an iOS application to present your applications in a fancy way. Therefore my application is a hybrid application (half JS web site, half mobile app).
I would love to see users' activity in my app when they are browsing through it and I thought GA might work well with it - but the problem is, that the outer app doesn't provide me with any URL of my inner JS app (the inner web site's URL is file:///).
At this page (link), I found that URL is not really important, that it is the tracking code which is important. So I used a dummy URL, added the GA snippet into my application and uploaded it in iPresent. I can't see no live activity though... :/ It also says the measuring is not installed (not used at a home page).
So I am wondering - is the URL really important?
Any ideas?
Thanks!
URL (or page path) is only important if you want to report on data based on which URLs your visitors went to.
If you app doesn't use URLs at all, perhaps it fits better with the "app" model where you are sending screen name data instead of page data. You can read more about the differences between web and app views here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2649553
I found out that URL is not needed. This type of problem can be solved by using GA Measurement Tool
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/
Validate your hit here:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/
I am trying to accomplish the following:
I want a button on my website that will open a windows program on the users computer. So for example, someone clicks "Remote Desktop" on my website, and it will open mstsc.exe on the machine.
Is this possible with any language?
The way you could do this is via an URI scheme. For that to work though, your application itself needs to have an URI scheme attached to it. Examples include mailto: (opens your email client - can also be a web client such as gmail), irc: (opens Internet Relay Chat client) and an example of a truly custom URI scheme (it isn't listed in the official list) is Github's Desktop application, which uses the URI scheme github-windows:. Again, for this to work, the app itself needs to have this built into itself.
I assume you didn't make this mstsc.exe "Remote Desktop" yourself, it is impossible to start this application in any way whatsoever using just your browser. If that would indeed be possible, it would be a massive security hole. It would mean you could simply run any program (or uninstall file) you'd like.
Note: If you did indeed make the application yourself, I suggest asking another question on this site, but making it specifically about registering custom URI schemes to your application, and also specifying what language your application is written in.
Problem definition:
Server is an embedded system with no access to Internet.
Each server is managed by web interface which uses JavaScript.
Each server has a local copy of JQuery library.
Clients (browsers) are connected to embedded systems (servers) via a very slow connection.
Clients have the latest browsers (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript 1.8.5)
Clients are not connected to Internet either.
Clients can't access multiple servers at the same time (servers are in distant locations and most probably a client can only access one server and nothing else, but later that day the client may go to another location and connect to another server).
Each server has an IP address (not necessarily in the same range) and no DNS name.
Every time the client connects to an embedded server, it fetches all the files including the huge JQuery library (huge=~90KB)
Question:
The JQuery library is too big for this slow connection but one-time download is acceptable. However, we don't want the clients to download it every time they connect to each new server. The JQuery on all these devices is the same. But apparently the browser cache is domain based. How can we cache the JQuery library so that the client doesn't have to download the JQuery every time it connects to a new server?
just link to it in one place...
for example, if you have a single server, http://1.2.3.4/ that you want to designate as your CDN, put jQuery on it, and link to it in your scripts using <script src="http://1.2.3.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
you could link it to the ip in your link tag. The server does not have to have access to that access or anything, and so all the clients will geht the jquery from the same server all the time and so it is cached.
Here is a simple solution: All your customers must edit their /etc/hosts file (Google for where you can find it on Windows) and put a line like this in their config:
1.2.3.4 jquery-from-closest-server.com
Each client must figure out the closest server which has jQuery and replace 1.2.3.4 with its IP address.
In your HTML code, always use the link http://jquery-from-closest-server.com/jquery.js
To be safe, you may want to register jquery-from-closest-server.com for those customers which do have Internet access.
When the browser asks for the file, it will use /etc/hosts to resolve the IP address. Since the domain name will be the same for all your embedded devices (changes in the IP address are ignored by the browser), the script will be downloaded once for all clients.
Note that this means you can never upgrade to a newer version of jQuery. The problem is that you'd have to replace it on all embedded devices at the same time because there is no telling from which server the customers are downloading it from.
If that bothers you (and it will in about four months after you discovered the first serious bug), here is another solution: Instead of serving the HTML from your embedded device, distribute a static web app (a set of HTML files and JavaScript) which customer can install in their desktop. Use AJAX and iframes to replace parts of the static web app with data from your embedded device.
Advantages:
very fast (no downloads at all)
only little code on the embedded device
easy upgrade strategy
No deadlocks when you need to upgrade either the embedded devices or your controller app.
[EDIT] PS: Consider to compress jQuery with gzip. That leaves you with a 33KB file. All HTML5 browsers can decode compressed files, you just have to tell them by setting the necessary HTTP headers.
Apparently there is no standard way to include JQuery in our project so we chose to replace JQuery with a smaller similar library. These are the options:
JQuery mobile is a better fit for our project since it has a smaller size and can do almost everything we need from JQuery.
Zepto.js is also another suitable replacement.
JQuip is a stripped down version of JQuery that can help our specific project.
I am trying to control a media device which has lot of multimedia content that it can play using another device(remote control device) like an ipad connected to the LAN. (UPnP)
I want the media device to be able to send the content listing to the remote device so that it will be rendered as a webpage on the remote controller. And actions on the webpages needs to be sent to the the device as commands to execute (like play, pause, next etc). The media device is an embedded device, hence can't have any server side scripting, all has to be done on the client side.
I want the page rendered to be HTML5. So, is it possible to generate dynamic HTML5 pages using just client side scripting?
Thanks a lot.
I am an embedded systems developer hence clueless about the web designing stuff.
Yes, this is possible. I work at Plex, and we have a similar need. Our Plex Media Server is a bunch of C++ software that doesn't build web pages or anything like that, it just serves static files and has API endpoints for controlling media.
I built a media manager that allows configuring the system (but not playback as of now, but the principle is the same) using a web page that is totally static. In fact, we use Cappuccino, which is essentially a JavaScript-only way of building a web page (there's essentially just enough html and css to bootstrap the Cappuccino environment). It uses Ajax to hit the C++ API to do anything else it needs to do.
You might try something similar, but it by no means needs to be Cappuccino - you can do it perfectly well with jQuery, HTML, and CSS.
I am about to build a web application and I want to allow other developers extend it with their own applications.
Should I do this with iFrames like Facebook?
Is this a good practice?
Are there other alternatives that let other developers extend my application (that is for the user it looks like it's from my application).
To be specific:
I want developers to be able to code applications that is embedded on my web application. Eg. if I have a file on my application they could provide a way for the users to interact with that file. Maybe a "preview" application that let the users preview the file.
Another application might draw a mindmap tree view of all the user's files.
What is the best way of doing this?
iFrame + Restful API on backend for data exchange?
Let them insert javascript on backend + frontend + html + css on my web application?
Other alternatives?
If you meant "embed" rather than "extend" and you just want people to drop a little box on a page and that's it, then an iframe should be fine.
However, if you want two-way communication or mashupability — rather than "opaque blob of HTML and hope for the best" communication — then a JavaScript or REST API might be a better call.
More specifics would make for an easier answer. If the functionality you need is on the level of an embedded ad or stackoverlflow flair then an iframe would work, if the functionality is more along the lines of a Google Map then an API of some sort would work better.
It depends on what you mean by "extend". When you use iFrames with 3rd parties, presumably vended from different domains than the host page, then you are constrained by cross-domain issues and cannot interact with the contents of those iFrames. If that's not an issue for you, then you can go ahead and try that strategy, but I can't see how merely adding iFrames without interopability is "extending" your web application.