Develop Reference

Publish data from browser app without writing my own server

I need users to be able to post data from a single page browser application (SPA) to me, but I can't put server-side code on the host.
Is there a web service that I can use for this? I looked at Amazon SQS (simple queue service) but I can't call their REST APIs from within the browser due to cross origin policy.
I favour ease of development over robustness right now, so even just receiving an email would be fine. I'm not sure that the site is even going to catch on. If it does, then I'll develop a server-side component and move hosts.

Not only there are Web Services, but nowadays there are robust systems that provide a way to server-side some logic on your applications. They are called BaaS or Backend as a Service providers, usually to provide some backbone to your front end applications.
Although they have multiple uses, I'm going to list the most common in my opinion:
For mobile applications - Instead of having to learn an API for each device you code to, you can use an standard platform to store logic and data for your application.
For prototyping - If you want to create a slick application, but you don't want to code all the backend logic for the data -less dealing with all the operations and system administration that represents-, through a BaaS provider you only need good Front End skills to code the simplest CRUD applications you can imagine. Some BaaS even allow you to bind some Reduce algorithms to calls your perform to their API.
For web applications - When PaaS (Platform as a Service) came to town to ease the job for Backend End developers in order to avoid the hassle of System Administration and Operations, it was just logic that the same was going to happen to the Backend. There are many clones that showcase the real power of this strategy.
All of this is amazing, but I have yet to mention any of them. I'm going to list the ones that I know the most and have actually used in projects. There are probably many, but as far as I know, this one have satisfied most of my news, whether it's any of the previously ones mentioned.
Parse.com
Parse's most outstanding features target mobile devices; however, nowadays Parse contains an incredible amount of API's that allows you to use it as full feature backend service for Javascript, Android and even Windows 8 applications (Windows 8 SDK was introduced a few months ago this year).
How does a Parse code looks in Javascript?
Parse works through classes and objects (ain't that beautiful?), so you first create a specific class (can be done through Javascript, REST or even the Data Browser manager) and then you add objects to specific classes.
First, add up Parse as a script tag in javascript:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.parsecdn.com/js/parse-1.1.15.min.js"></script>
Then, through a given Application ID and a Javascript Key, initialize Parse.
Parse.initialize("APPLICATION_ID", "JAVASCRIPT_KEY");
From there, it's all object manipulation
var Person = Parse.Object.extend("Person"); //Person is a class *cof* uppercase *cof*
var personObject = new Person();
personObject.save({name: "John"}, {
success: function(object) {
console.log("The object with the data "+ JSON.stringify(object) + " was saved successfully.");
},
error: function(model, error) {
console.log("There was an error! The following model and error object were provided by the Server");
console.log(model);
console.log(error);
}
});
What about authentication and security?
Parse has a User based authentication system, which pretty much allows you to store a base of users that can manipulate the data. If map the data with User information, you can ensure that only a given user can manipulate specific data. Plus, in the settings of your Parse application, you can specify that no clients are allowed to create classes, to ensure innecesary calls are performed.
Did you REALLY used in a web application?
Yes, it was my tool of choice for a medium fidelity prototype.
Firebase.com
Firebase's main feature is the ability to provide Real Time to your application without all the hassle. You don't need a MeteorJS server in order to bring Push Notifications to your software. If you know Javascript, you are half way through to bring Real Time magic to your users.
How does a Firebase looks in Javascript?
Firebase works in a REST fashion, and I think they do an amazing job structuring the Glory of REST. As a good example, look at the following Resource structure in Firebase:
https://SampleChat.firebaseIO-demo.com/users/fred/name/first
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that you are retrieve the first name of the user "Fred", giving there's at least one -usually there should be a UUID instead of a name, but hey, it's an example, give me a break-.
In order to start using Firebase, as with Parse, add up their CDN Javascript
<script type='text/javascript' src='https://cdn.firebase.com/v0/firebase.js'></script>
Now, create a reference object that will allow you to consume the Firebase API
var myRootRef = new Firebase('https://myprojectname.firebaseIO-demo.com/');
From there, you can create a bunch of neat applications.
var USERS_LOCATION = 'https://SampleChat.firebaseIO-demo.com/users';
var userId = "Fred"; // Username
var usersRef = new Firebase(USERS_LOCATION);
usersRef.child(userId).once('value', function(snapshot) {
var exists = (snapshot.val() !== null);
if (exists) {
console.log("Username "+userId+" is part of our database");
} else {
console.log("We have no register of the username "+userId);
}
});
What about authentication and security?
You are in luck! Firebase released their Security API about two weeks ago! I have yet to explore it, but I'm sure it fills most of the gaps that allowed random people to use your reference to their own purpose.
Did you REALLY used in a web application?
Eeehm... ok, no. I used it in a Chrome Extension! It's still in process but it's going to be a Real Time chat inside a Chrome Extension. Ain't that cool? Fine. I find it cool. Anyway, you can browse more awesome examples for Firebase in their examples page.
What's the magic of these services? If you read your Dependency Injection and Mock Object Testing, at some point you can completely replace all of those services for your own through a REST Web Service provider.
Since these services were created to be used inside any application, they are CORS ready. As stated before, I have successfully used both of them from multiple domains without any issue (I'm even trying to use Firebase in a Chrome Extension, and I'm sure I will succeed soon).
Both Parse and Firebase have Data Browser managers, which means that you can see the data you are manipulating through a simple web browser. As a final disclaimer, I have no relationship with any of those services other than the face that James Taplin (Firebase Co-founder) was amazing enough to lend me some Beta access to Firebase.

You actually CAN use SQS from the browser, even without CORS, as long as you only need the browser to send messages, not receive them. Warning: this is a kludge that would make my CS professors cry.
When you perform a GET request via javascript, the browser will always perform the request, however, you'll only get access to the response if it was from the same origin (protocol, host, port). This is your ticket to ride, since messages can be posted to an SQS queue with just a GET, and who really cares about the response anyways?
Assuming you're using jquery, your queue is https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/71717171/myqueue, and allows anyone to post a message, the following will post a message with the body "HITHERE" to the queue:
$.ajax({
url: 'https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/71717171/myqueue' +
'?Action=SendMessage' +
'&Version=2012-11-05' +
'&MessageBody=HITHERE'
})
The'll be an error in the console saying that the request failed, but the message will show up in the queue anyways.

Have you considered JSONP? That is one way of calling cross-domain scripts from javascript without running into the same origin policy. You're going to have to set up some script somewhere to send you the data, though. Javascript just isn't up to the task.

Depending in what kind of data you want to send, and what you're going to do with it, one way of solving it would be to post the data to a Google Spreadsheet using Ajax. It's a bit tricky to accomplish though.Here is another stackoverflow question about it.
If presentation isn't that important you can just have an embedded Google Spreadsheet Form.

What about mailto:youremail#goeshere.com ? ihihi
Meantime, you can turn on some free hostings like Altervista or Heroku or somenthing else like them .. so you can connect to their server , if i remember these free services allows servers p2p, so you can create a sort of personal web services and push ajax requests as well, obviously their servers are slow for free accounts, but i think it's enought if you do not have so much users traffic, else you should turn on some better VPS or Hosting or Cloud solution.

Maybe CouchDB can provide what you're after. IrisCouch provides free CouchDB instances. Lock it down so that users can't view documents and have a sensible validation function and you've got yourself an easy RESTful place to stick your data in.

Is it possible to retrive database details using javascript only

I am newbie to javascript. I am just wondering whether is it possible to fetch database details using only javascript. I know javascript is client side component. Normally using method we fetch database details.
public static void main(String args[]) throws SQLException {
//URL of Oracle database server
String url = "jdbc:oracle:thin:#localhost:1632:XE";
//properties for creating connection to Oracle database
Properties props = new Properties();
props.setProperty("user", "scott");
props.setProperty("password", "tiger");
//creating connection to Oracle database using JDBC
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url,props);
String sql ="select sysdate as current_day from dual";
//creating PreparedStatement object to execute query
PreparedStatement preStatement = conn.prepareStatement(sql);
ResultSet result = preStatement.executeQuery();
while(result.next()){
System.out.println("Current Date from Oracle : " + result.getString("current_day"));
}
System.out.println("done");
}
}
Is it possible to fetch same thing using only javascript which works on any machine like windows,linux and any browsers like mozilla, IE, Safari etc.? Any pointer, suggestion really helpful me to understand power of javascript.

No, it is not possible using client-side javascript.
There are server side javascript options like node.js.
You can take a look at those.

With the websockets feature of HTML5, you can use JavaScript to connect to a certain host and communicate via network. So, it would be technically possible to connect to the database port and send queries and receive results.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets
However, HTML5 is still just a proposal and browsers are only starting to implement its features. Many currently used browsers (like older versions of IE), of course, don't implement any of the features. Besides, there probably aren't any database drivers for JS, so you would have to do all the communication low-level, which you probably don't want to.
The usual way how this is done in web applications is that JavaScript requests the data by AJAX from a server, which then communicates with the database. Those servers are often made in PHP, but you can use your Java code to make a servlet. Basically, all it takes is to move your code to a doGet() or doPost() function of a HttpServlet, pack the classes into a web archive and launch it with Tomcat or Jetty.

JavaScript can only initiate calls to server side code that in turn connects to the database.
A common technique these days is to make AJAX calls (using JavaScript) to call services that will return data from a database.
There are several examples online that describes the technique

javascript and oracle database

Is there anyway so that i can connect to oracle database through javascript and access the database values

It depends on where the JavaScript is running.
In most cases, it runs in a web browser, and that host environment doesn't provide any way to connect to a remote database. Some browsers have built in SQL databases (which were in the HTML 5 specification, I'm not sure if they still are), I think they use SQLite (certainly not Oracle).
If you want to connect to Oracle from a web browser, then you will need some sort of intermediary. This usually means a web server that provides an HTTP based API and uses Perl, PHP, ASP.NET, etc, etc to talk to the database.
Other host environments may provide an Oracle API, but you would have to be more specific about which one you are using.

You could try to create an AJAX application building upon Oracle PL/SQL Gateway. See also http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10g/appdev.101/b10795/adfns_we.htm .
As it happens, I have long ago written about this: http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/blog/2006/11/30.php .

you can use server-side JScript, although this, i'm pretty sure, is only supported by iis. this is how you accomplish it anyways;
<%#Language="JScript"%>
<%
var sqlbeg = "SELECT * FROM sbc WHERE disp = 'F00' AND rec_uid IS NULL";
var aconn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection");
var recset = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset");
aconn.Open("DSN=ACUSQL_SBC;UID=sbc;PWD=sbc;");
recset.Open(sqlbeg, aconn, 3, 3);
%>

Server-side Javascript in production fails to open connection to a named instance of SQL2008

I've got a production site that has been working for years with a SQL Server 2000 default instance on server named MDWDATA. TCP port 1433 and Named Pipes are enabled there. My goal is to get this web app working with a copy of the database upgraded to SQL Server 2008. I've installed SQL2008 with SP1 on a server called DEVMOJITO and tested the new database using various VB6 desktop programs that exercise various stored procs in a client-server fashion and parts of the website itself work fine against the upgraded database residing on this named instance of SQL2008. So, while I am happy that the database upgrade seems fine there is a part of this website that fails with this Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [1231]. I think this error is misleading. I disabled Named Pipes on the SQL2000 instance used by the production site, restarted SQL and all the ASP code still continued to work fine (plus we have a firewall between both database servers and these web virtual directories on a public facing webserver.
URL to my production virtual directory which demos the working page:
URL to my development v-directory which demos the failing page:
All the code is the same on both prod and dev sites except that on dev I'm trying to connect to the upgraded database.
I know there are dozens of things to check which I've been searching for but here are a few things I can offer to help you help me:
The code that is failing is server-side Javascript adapted from Brent Ashley's "Javascript Remote Scripting (JSRS)" code package years ago. It operates in an AJAX-like manner by posting requests back to different ASP pages and then handling a callback. I think the key thing to point out here is how I changed the connection to the database: (I cannot get Javascript to format right here!)
function setDBConnect(datasource)
{
var strConnect; //ADO connection string
//strConnect = "DRIVER=SQL Server;SERVER=MDWDATA;UID=uname;PASSWORD=x; DATABASE=StagingMDS;";
strConnect = "Provider=SQLNCLI10;Server=DEVMOJITO\MSSQLSERVER2008;Uid=uname;Pwd=x;DATABASE=StagingMDS;";
return strConnect;
}
function serializeSql( sql , datasource)
{
var conn = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection");
var ConnectString = setDBConnect(datasource);
conn.Open( ConnectString );
var rs = conn.Execute( sql );
Please note how the connection string differs. I think that could be the problem but I don't know what to do. I am surprised the error returned says "named pipes" was involved because I really wanted to use TCP. The connection string syntax here is the same as used successfully on a different part of the site which uses VBScript which I'll paste here to show:
if DataBaseConnectionsAreNeeded(strScriptName) then
dim strWebDB
Set objConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
if IsProductionWeb() Then
strWebDB = "DATABASE=MDS;SERVER=MDWDATA;DRIVER=SQL Server;UID=uname;PASSWORD=x;"
end if
if IsDevelopmentWeb() Then
strWebDB = "Provider=SQLNCLI10;Server=DEVMOJITO\MSSQLSERVER2008;Database=StagingMDS;UID=uname;PASSWORD=x;"
end if
objConn.ConnectionString = strWebDB
objConn.ConnectionTimeout = 30
objConn.Open
set oCmd = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
oCmd.ActiveConnection = objConn
This code works in both prod and dev virtual directories and other code in other parts of the web which use ASP.NET work against both databases correctly. Named pipes and TCP are both enabled on each server. I don't understand the string used by the Pipes but I am using the defaults always.
I wonder why the Javascript call above results in use of named pipes instead of TCP. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Summary of what I did to get this working:
Add an extra slash to the connection string since this is server-side Javascript:
Server=tcp:DEVMOJITO\MSSQLSERVER2008,1219;
Explicitly code tcp: as a protocol prefix and port 1219. I learned that by default a named instance of SQL uses dynamic porting. I ended up turning that off and chose, somewhat arbitrarily, the port 1219, which dynamic had chosen before I turned it off. There are probably other ways to get this part working.
Finally, I discovered that SET NOCOUNT ON needed to be added to the stored procedure being called. Otherwise, the symptom is the message: "Operation is not allowed when the object is closed".

How to connect to SQL Server database from JavaScript in the browser?

Can anybody give me some sample source code showing how to connect to a SQL Server 2005 database from JavaScript locally? I am learning web programming on my desktop.
Or do I need to use any other scripting language? Suggest some alternatives if you have them, but I am now trying to do it with JavaScript. My SQL Server is locally installed on my desktop — SQL Server Management Studio 2005 and IE7 browser.

You shouldn´t use client javascript to access databases for several reasons (bad practice, security issues, etc) but if you really want to do this, here is an example:
var connection = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection") ;
var connectionstring="Data Source=<server>;Initial Catalog=<catalog>;User ID=<user>;Password=<password>;Provider=SQLOLEDB";
connection.Open(connectionstring);
var rs = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Recordset");
rs.Open("SELECT * FROM table", connection);
rs.MoveFirst
while(!rs.eof)
{
document.write(rs.fields(1));
rs.movenext;
}
rs.close;
connection.close;
A better way to connect to a sql server would be to use some server side language like PHP, Java, .NET, among others. Client javascript should be used only for the interfaces.
And there are rumors of an ancient legend about the existence of server javascript, but this is another story. ;)

This would be really bad to do because sharing your connection string opens up your website to so many vulnerabilities that you can't simply patch up, you have to use a different method if you want it to be secure. Otherwise you are opening up to a huge audience to take advantage of your site.

A perfect working code..
<script>
var objConnection = new ActiveXObject("adodb.connection");
var strConn = "driver={sql server};server=QITBLRQIPL030;database=adventureworks;uid=sa;password=12345";
objConnection.Open(strConn);
var rs = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Recordset");
var strQuery = "SELECT * FROM Person.Address";
rs.Open(strQuery, objConnection);
rs.MoveFirst();
while (!rs.EOF) {
document.write(rs.fields(0) + " ");
document.write(rs.fields(1) + " ");
document.write(rs.fields(2) + " ");
document.write(rs.fields(3) + " ");
document.write(rs.fields(4) + "<br/>");
rs.movenext();
}
</script>

Web services
SQL 2005+ supports native WebServices that you could almost use although I wouldn't suggest it, because of security risks you may face. Why did I say almost. Well Javascript is not SOAP native, so it would be a bit more complicated to actually make it. You'd have to send and receive SOAP via XmlHttpRequest. Check google for Javascript SOAP clients.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345123.aspx - SQL native WebServices
http://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+soap - Google results for Javascript SOAP clients

Playing with JavaScript in an HTA I had no luck with a driver={SQL Server};... connection string, but a named DSN was OK :
I set up TestDSN and it tested OK, and then var strConn= "DSN=TestDSN"; worked, so I carried on experimenting for my in-house testing and learning purposes.
Our server has several instances running, e.g. server1\dev and server1\Test which made things slightly more tricky as I managed to waste some time forgetting to escape the \ as \\ :)
After some dead-ends with server=server1;instanceName=dev in the connection strings, I eventually got this one to work :
var strConn= "Provider=SQLOLEDB;Data Source=server1\\dev;Trusted_Connection=Yes;Initial Catalog=MyDatabase;"
Using Windows credentials rather than supplying a user/pwd, I found an interesting diversion was discovering the subtleties of Integrated Security = true v Integrated Security = SSPI v Trusted_Connection=Yes - see Difference between Integrated Security = True and Integrated Security = SSPI
Beware that RecordCount will come back as -1 if using the default adOpenForwardOnly type. If you're working with small result sets and/or don't mind the whole lot in memory at once, use rs.Open(strQuery, objConnection, 3); (3=adOpenStatic) and this gives a valid rs.RecordCount

As stated before it shouldn't be done using client side Javascript but there's a framework for implementing what you want more securely.
Nodejs is a framework that allows you to code server connections in javascript so have a look into Nodejs and you'll probably learn a bit more about communicating with databases and grabbing data you need.

I dont think you can connect to SQL server from client side javascripts. You need to pick up some server side language to build web applications which can interact with your database and use javascript only to make your user interface better to interact with.
you can pick up any server side scripting language based on your language preference :
PHP
ASP.Net
Ruby On Rails

(sorry, this was a more generic answer about SQL backends--I hadn't read the answer about SQL Server 2005's WebServices feature. Although, this feature is still run over HTTP rather than more directly via sockets, so essentially they've built a mini web server into the database server, so this answer is still another route you could take.)
You can also connect directly using sockets (google "javascript sockets") and by directly at this point I mean using a Flash file for this purpose, although HTML5 has Web Sockets as part of the spec which I believe let you do the same thing.
Some people cite security issues, but if you designed your database permissions correctly you should theoretically be able to access the database from any front end, including OSQL, and not have a security breach. The security issue, then, would be if you weren't connecting via SSL.
Finally, though, I'm pretty sure this is all theoretical because I don't believe any JavaScript libraries exist for handling the communications protocols for SSL or SQL Server, so unless you're willing to figure these things out yourself it'd be better to go the route of having a web server and server-side scripting language in between the browser and the database.