In our development environment we use jetty, in our production we use tomcat.
For some functionality we use javascript but there are some hardcoded locations for the use of jetty or tomcat.
I know it's a bit weird to use two server versions but it just the way it is.
So now when we are building the application, sometimes people forget to change the server version in the javascript file.
Is there a way to automatically check if the server is jetty or tomcat from javascript?
I was thinking of placing an txt file in the root of tomcat and let it check whether or not it exists but maybe there is a way to do it more natively.
Assuming one/both of your servers are sending the Server HTTP header (and Jetty usually does, and can easily be configured to do so), then you could use an XMLHttpRequest and look at the response headers.
Read more here: Accessing the web page's HTTP Headers in JavaScript
However, I would suggest that you extract the pieces of code that change between servers into 1 javascript file. e.g:
/* server_info.js */
locations = {
file1 : "/some/path",
file2 : "/another/path"
};
And include that file as a <script> in all your pages.
Then you can have Jetty and Tomcat each use a different version of that file. It should be easy enough to have a servlet (or filter, or action, or whatever exists in your framework) that looks at the server type and serves up the right file.
If that's too much, then you could do the same thing, but simply have:
/* server_info.js */
server_type = "tomcat";
And vary that file by server (you could easily generate that file in a JSP, or something similar)
Obligatory warning: As I'm sure you know, having different servers in dev and prod is not a fantastic idea, for these sorts of reasons. Once you implement a solution to this problem, how are you going to know that the tomcat code works?
Jetty is more than capable of being a production server, and tomcat can do a good job in development. I suspect you (as a team) are making more work for yourselves than really ought to be.
you could make an ajax request to the server and if each one responds in a unique way, you'll know which is which. whether that's the existence of a different file or different content in a particular file, there are many ways the servers can differentiate themselves to the client.
Related
Maybe i'm misunderstanding how Node.js works but, I would like to use it just as a server backend for a web app, without it running as a service/listening a port.
I'm willing to hear ideas to better solve the issue, this app will only be available on our intranet.
Example of what i'm thinking :
backend server.js :
function connectDb(usr, pwrd){
//Some npm package code to connect to a db
return console.log("Sucessfully connected")
}
frontend javascript.js :
require("server.js")
$(".connect.button").on("click", function(e){
connectDb($(".connect.user").text(), $(".connect.pwrd").text())
})
There are two different aspects with your question and code example on which you could work to get a better understanding of the ecosystem.
Client / Server
When a client wants to get some resource from a server, it connects to a specific port on that server, on which the back-end application is "listening". That means, to be able to serve resources coming from a database, you must have a Node process listening to a port, fetching the requested resources from the database, and returning them. The perfect format for that kind of data exchange is JSON.
To get a better understanding of this process, you may want to try and write a simple Node app sending a piece of JSON over the network when it receives a request, and try to load it with an XHR in client code (for example with JQuery's AJAX method). Then, try and serve a dynamic piece of JSON coming from a database, with a query based on the request's content.
Module loading
require("server.js") only works in Node, and can't be used in JavaScript that is running in a client's browser (Well, at least for now. Maybe some kind of module loading could be normalised for browsers, but that's another debate.).
To use a script in a client browser, you have to include it in the loaded page with a <script> tag.
In node, you can load a script file with require. However, said script must declare what functions or variables are exposed to the scripts that require it. To achieve it, you must export these variables or function setting module.exports.
See this article to get some basic understanding, and this part of Node docs to master all the details of module loading. This is quite important, as this will help you structure your app and avoid strange bugs.
For one thing, node itself isn't a web server: it's a JS interpreter, which (among other things) can be used to write a web server. But node itself isn't a web server any more than Java is.
But if you want things to be able to connect to your node program, in order to do things like access a database, or serve a webpage, then, yeah, your program needs to be listening on some port on the machine it's running on.
Simply having your node program listening to a specific port on your machine doesn't mean that anyone else can access it; but that's really a networking question not a programming question.
I am concerned with the feasibility of this:
On a pre-configured machine I will have a Web-Application pre-installed, next to an Apache-Suite. So client and server are the same!
In this Web-Application Users can drag and drop PDF-Files to an USB-Icon.
Then the Web-App should write the dropped PDF to an attached USB-Stick.
I have never done something like this (writing to USB), so I am fairly insecure.
And I am well aware of the browser-restrictions concerning JavaScript and Filesystem-Access, but...
after researching a bit I found out, that there might be some possible and
relevant (I'm a Web-Platform-Guy) solutions to this:
Make a "Chrome App" with USB-Permission (does this really work?)
Use PHP to find the USB and then write to it (how would that work under Windows?)
Use some Flash as middle man (not preferred)
Now I'd like to know:
Has anyone some good experience with before mentioned possibilities?
Has anybody ever done something similar? Did it work? Which path did you choose?
How would I know which drive the USB is mounted, and how would I get sure?
What other possible solutions to this problem are there?
You have a website ('client-side' user interface) and a back-end server ('server-side') running on the same machine. This gives you 2 options:
Client-side: Download a file through the browser via HTTP GET and let the user choose where they save it.
Server-side: Build your USB interactions into the back-end (Node.js) code, as #mcgraphix suggests.
Interacting with the USB on the server-side provides the most flexibility. Furthermore, there are a number of libraries that you can leverage. Head to npmjs.org and consider, among others, the following Node.js server-side packages:
usb-detection
usb
With the server-side approach, initiate a Webservice request when the user completes the drag & drop action on the client, and implement the USB interaction within the server (Express.js or similar) method which services the request.
If the letter of the stick is known then writing a file from PHP will be simple
file_put_contents( 'E:\\folder\\file.pdf', $data );
Update
You can read a list of drives into a dropdown and allow a user to select a default drive to write to
https://stackoverflow.com/a/8210132/696535
Your question is more an architecture question than a code specific question.
Your web app (if you insist on a web app) should have two major components, a server side component that can be given arbitrary commands, and a client side component (javascript using XMLHttpRequest) that can make requests to the server side component to execute said arbitrary commands.
So your server side component, the component that serves your web page should have some server side code that can write your pdf to the file system, it should probably generate the pdf file as well rather than doing that on the web browser.
Which technology you use is up to you, whether that's PHP, .Net, Node.js etc...
The general gist is you want a server side framework that deals with HTTP requests, in your case probably a post request from the client side containing the encoded pdf, and responds accordingly. Bind a particular http route to trigger your save logic.
Your http post request to the server will contain your payload which is the pdf file to a particular path, e.g. http://localhost/savepdf that whichever technology stack http listens to (you'll need to configure that)
Your server side component should read the incoming data, decode it as appropriate then make a file system request to write the received payload to disk.
I am working on a file upload system which will store individual parts of large files on more than one server. So the distribution of a 1GB file will look something like this:
Server 1: 0-128MB
Server 2: 128MB-256MB
Server 2: 256MB-384MB
... etc
The intention of this is to allow for redundancy (each part will exist on more than one server), security (no one server has access to the entire file), and cost (bandwidth expenses are distributed).
I am curious if anyone has an opinion on how I might be able to "trick" web browsers into downloading the various parts all in one link.
What I had in mind was something like:
Browser is linked to Server 1, which provides a content-size of the full file
Once 128MB is served, Server 1 will intentionally close the connection
Hopefully, the browser will try to restart the download, requesting Server 1
Server 1 provides a 3XX redirect to Server 2
Browser continues downloading from Server 2
I don't know for certain that my example works, as I haven't tested it yet. I was curious if there were other solutions someone might have?
I'd like to make the whole process as easy as possible (ideally requiring no work beyond a simple download). I don't want the users to have to use another program (ie: cat'ing the files together). I'd also like to not use a proxy server, since it would incur extra bandwidth costs.
As far as I'm aware, there is no javascript solution for writing a file, if there was one, that would be great.
AFAIK this is not possible by using the HTTP protocol. You can probably use a custom browser extension but it would depend on the browser. Another alternative is to create a Java applet that would download the file from different servers. The applet can accept the URLs to the different servers as parameters.
To save the generated file:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/4551467/329062
That solution stores the file in memory though, so it won't work with very large files.
You can download the partial files into a JS variable using JSONP. That will also let you get around the same-origin policy.
Javascripts security model will only allow you to access data from the same origin where the Javascript came from - i.e. not multiple servers.
If you are going to have the file bits on multiple servers, you will need the user to load the web page, fetch the bit and then finally stick the bits together in the correct order. If you can manage to get all your users to do this (correctly), you are a better man than I.
It's possible to do in modern browsers over standard HTTP.
You can use XHR2 with CORS to download file chunks as ArrayBuffers and then merge them using Blob constructor and use createObjectURL to send merged file to the user.
However, I suspect that browsers will store these objects in RAM, so it's probably a bad idea to use it for large files.
In order to provide a service for webmasters, I need to download the public part of their site. I'm currently doing it using wget on my server, but it introduce a lot of load, and I'd like to move that part to the client side.
Does an implementation of wget exists in Javascript?
If it exists, I could zip the files and send them to my server for processing, that would allow me to concentrate on the core business for my app.
I know some compression library exists in Js (such as zip.js), but I was unable to find the wget counterpart. Do you know something similar?
Does an implementation of wget exists in Javascript?
I doubt it due to the same origin policy restriction built-in browsers which prevents you from fetching contents located on other domains. If the contents is located on your domain and you are not violating the security policy you could use AJAX.
first of all my question: Is it possible to pass file names from a running Flash application, which only purpose is to enable multiple-file-selection, to a JavaScript application which handles upload of all files to the server?
I have examined various Flash upload solutions (like SWFUpload, Uploadify, etc.) and none of them meets my needs. I want an easy to implement solution (like Uploadify) which also lets me specify various parts of the HTTP request.
The reason I need this is because my upload form uses session cookies (for user authentication) and an CSRF token both passed to the server when uploading files.
Is it technically possible to pass filenames (+ paths) to a JavaScript application which then handles the upload?
Thank you,
FMD
I'm sorry but no, its not possible to pass the filenames to JavaScript from Flash, however, you could pass the session ID to Flash.
If you are using PHP (I'm not saying you are, your server side language might have similar functions), you could reestablish the session:
session_id($_POST['ses']);
session_start();
The reason why you can't pass the filenames to JavaScript, (or set it by script in the first place) is that it would be a major security issue, consider the following:
var uploader = document.getElementById('id_of_input_type_file');
uploader.value = 'c:\Users\Administrator\Documents\commonBankKeyFile.ebjkeystore';
document.getElementById('formId').submit();
...And there you go, I just got your bank credentials just by you visiting my page, no Phishing needed.