I try to create a game that should help people learn for university. My problem is, how can player share questions between phones and also get them into the right folder. Is there a way for setting up a server to upload files and then download them? I had something in mind like the Levelcode system from "Mario Maker".
If a system like the one in "Mario Maker" would work, what kind of server do I need? I know I need some kind of a Database but do I need something like mySQL? And also how do I set it up? I never learned server programming, but I'm eager to learn.
You need to set up and host a REST API.
There are many different ways to go about it, and it's really up to your preference for your host service, programming language, and a database library.
If you have no preference. I'd recommend:
AWS - powerful and you get 12 months of free hosting
Golang - modern, fast, and great for web apps
SQLite (go-sqlite3) - simple and lightweight
You will need to setup handlers for requests. So for example:
To add a new level:
POST example.com/level/
To get an existing level:
GET example.com/level/:id
In Golang you can handle a request using:
func levelHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
switch r.Method {
case "GET":
// find level id in the database
case "POST":
// add level to database
}
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/level", levelHandler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil);
}
To modify an existing level:
PUT example.com/level/:id
The problem now is that anyone in the world will be able to change any level. You will want to add user authentication, and that's a whole other can of worms.
You may consider using REST asset for Unity.
Just one final note: server programming is hard, be prepared to spend a lot of time trying, failing, and learning.
Related
I want to add and remove actors to a pool (group?) that should receive messages through a router using consistent hash mapping (message has id which is consistent with path of entity).
But after creation of the pool there is only the IActorRef returned and I don't know how to "Tell" about new Actors to add.
I have read several tutorials and hints about routing, for example this: https://github.com/petabridge/akka-bootcamp/tree/master/src/Unit-3/lesson2
but these don't fit.
Maybe I need to write an own router with these messages myself?
There are predefined messages within the Akka.Routing package which allows to add and remove new routees. you can find the code lines in Akka.net here. For example the following code adds an IActorRef to an existing router (I tested this with ConsistentHashingGroup):
var routee = Routee.FromActorRef(actor);
router.Tell(new AddRoutee(routee));
A little bit annoying that I had to crawl through the source code to find the way how to do this because it is not part of petabridge's bootcamp (or did I overlooked it?) and I did't found an answer anywhere else even though I think this is a very typical and common scenario. The documentation is somewhat rudimental in this field.
Hopefully, this helps someone out there to safe some minutes of lifetime and do somewhat more interesting on the domain of the software to develop with Akka.net instead of searching how to use this framework. ;-)
I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at a summer internship, it's a lot of new technologies and concepts I've never used before and finding good resources to explain these things and not just regurgitate situational tutorials are very scarce. Particularly I'd like to talk about ASP.NET.
What I currently have is a simple webpage made using ASP.NET in visual studio. My general task is to access a database, get the info from the database, turn the data into JSON, and send that data to a python script which will then parse the JSON and do stuff with it, etc.
I am able to get as far as making the JSON object. I can get the user to download the json object as a file, but what I really want to do is just pass it through the network by accessing my web site from the python script using urllib2. This is where I have become completely lost. There are so many terms I've never heard of before, things like services, web APIs, controllers, routing and all these things I've spent hours digging around in and following basic tutorials but still cannot find a firm grasp on the concepts let alone how to accomplish it in a practical manner.
To be completely clear here are my goals:
Send 5 parameters usingurllib2 in python to my asp.net site
use these parameters to query the database and get a json object (COMPLETE)
return the json to the python script
I have no idea how to set up a "service" or how to even go about doing so. I know that I have to attach it to my website somehow but I'm not sure. Any suggestions or good resources would be much appreciated. I'm just looking for some direction and advice on how to go about accomplishing #1 and #3 on my list.
Thank you for taking the time to read through my post!
For part one you could do this:
import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://mysite.io?paramOne=ValueOne/')
Now the response object will have your JSON so you can do this:
json = response.read()
urllib2 has a nice way of preparing URL parameters which you might want to look into.
I'm trying to create a system that will be very modular. with the idea in mind that no module should really know about any other module (each running in it's own process).
There will be another program that will open, and will be able to tell what these modules will send and receive(this I largely have covered).
the issue I'm having at the moment, is there a way for me to be able to interrogate the application inside another process, or app domain? and in so doing late bind these modules together.
EG:
A module that can broadcast 'X' at runtime will be liked to a module that can accept 'X'.
This may be quite vague, and if so please ask me to clarify on anything I have not covered.
Right now, I Just need to know if it is possible to interrogate a process, and if so how? I Am fairly new to this but my initial research hasn't taken me to far.
I modeled a system like this recently for a personal home automation system. Basically, I'd want to be able to have certain sensors (microphones, cameras, etc.) broadcast what they have, and have other computers or programs get that information whenever they need it, without knowing exactly who is going to be getting the data at compile time.
If this sounds like what you're looking for, I'd look into a Pub-Sub style architecture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern
You're not really interrogating the process in this kind of architecture, but I think you get a similar result. Basically, you'll have one main pub-sub server.
In the Diagram above, Clients 2 and 3 "subscribe" to receive a specific kind of message. The server knows who is subscribed to what, so that when Client 1 sends that message, the server knows it needs to route it to the correct clients.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: After re-reading your question, I feel that you may have already gotten this far. Maybe all you need is something like
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb546102(v=vs.110).aspx
Pipes allow you to pass some information between processes. You'll have to serialize and de-serialize the data across the pipe, but this (coupled with a pub-sub architecture) should give you what you need.
Im building a small winforms app using: ayende rhino licensing. The licensing is working fine, I can create licences and distribute them as I choose.
The problem is, How do I make each license work on just one machine? I know there is a class in ayende's project called LicensingService which I believe does something like what I'm trying to do, but I just cant figure it out. I've done quite a bit of searching and couldnt really find any tutorials except this one.
Maybe someone has implemented this, or has some tips on how I could accomplish this? I do have access to a webserver, if that helps.
Any help is much appreciated, as always.
Depends how annoying you want to make it for your users to be honest. You could implement a HWID (see How to fast get Hardware-ID in C#? on how to generate them) which will be unique from system to system, then have your program check if the HWID matches the ID found to the place you store them on-line (usually by using a database).
Needless to say, this will make your application require internet connection in order to run which might be a bit frustrating for your users.
Or you can merge the HWID with the serial and have your application do the same to verify if they match, but that would be easily cracked by the average cracker.
In the end of the day, .net isn't the best as far as security goes since you can easily get the source code and modify the assemblies as needed to patch certain protections. Keep that in mind when deciding what route you want to take to protect your software.
I do not know what exactly is a rhino licensing. To tackle your need generally there are two approaches.
Either give some randomly generated password to the client machine, and maintain a pool of passwords in your server. Each time a password is entered to register the application in a local machine, check if it was already registered elsewhere by connecting to your server via internet.
Or, what we do is, generate a code unique to that machine (perhaps a hash of some unique machine id, say mac id) and get the client sent it to you. You would then rehash the code and send it back using some logic. Now when the client enters this code to his machine do the same thing: fetch the very machine id, do the same rehashing using the same some logicand check if it matches.
I cant think of anything else
I am at the earliest stage of writing a desktop application for use by multiple users. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to approach this.
The Spec
I will persist my Model in a file which would often be used on a mapped network drive. (It is for the design of roadways and other linear features like railways and streams.)
The various end users need to be able to connect to and edit the file simultaneously. For example, Billy Bob is working on the road named US321 while Rupert is working on I40. The models for each road live in the same file. End users can "claim" any road name, in which only the claimant can edit the given road. Rupert can't edit US321 while Billy Bob has it claimed, but Rupert can read US321 for reference. Once a user is finished editing the road data, he can release the claim and someone else could edit it.
Limitations on Serialization?
My understanding of Serialization is quite limited (see my profile). But it looks to me like there is a one-to-one correlation between objects and serialization files. So if I use serialization to implement this, it would not be possible to claim just a part of it nor would it be possible to update only a part of it. (Is this correct? If not, then I can use Serialization, right?)
The Solution I am Considering
I am considering using SQL Server Express, and I am interested in the community's warnings, corrections, or affirmations on this.
The end users would not have to know that I am using SQL Server Express in the background. (I would even change the file extension to something suitable to my app.) I would load roads into a list, and each road would be "claimable". Claiming a road would mark it in the database for the other instances of the app to react to accordingly, kind of like it is a shared MS Excel file that multiple people can edit simultaneously, but (in the analogy to Excel) being able to lock individual worksheets.
[Edit] See Micah Armantrout's very informative response, below. So now I am wondering about using Microsoft Access as the intermediating db app.
[Edit]
Conclusion
Thanks to everyone for their helpful answers and comments. Micah's answer was very helpful since I did not realize I would be limited to the file being controled by only one server. Although it makes perfect sense now, I had not anticipated it, and if I had gone that route, I would have run aground on it after many hours of working in that direction.
When I first read urbadave's idea, I dismissed it as something I had already considered and not liked. But after thinking it over, it is clearly the simplest approach. I just use a directory like it is a file, but with user-transparency to my my top level sub-objects. But there clearly is an appeal to having my whole model be encapsualted into a single file.
So this is what I have decided to do: Start with just writing to a directory, just as urbadave suggests. Then later test out putting it in a zip directory and using the ZipPackage class to pluck out and insert the individual serialized files (or XML files -- another decision I have to make some day).
Paul
SQL server will work for what you are looking for but if your going to have multiple users you need to have a machine setup to be a server. It will not do you any good to have sql server express installed on each machine It might be one of the users machines or an actual server with SQL server express you are going to need to set it up to be accessible outside of a current machine to do this follow this tutorial.
If you are using anything past windows XP SP2 you will need to open up the ports of the firewall follow these instructions this is also talked about in the link below.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlexpress/archive/2005/05/05/415084.aspx
As far as sharing data I mean seeing other peoples work. If you are not wanting to install sql server on a server you can use MS Access I would refer you to a article on which one to use when
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/should-you-use-sql-server-express-edition-or-microsoft-access-for-your-small-business-applications/6140859
While I have access to a nice database at work, most of my personal programming does not use a database. One of the tricks I've used in the past is that file extensions are meant to carry meaning. In your case, you can exploit file extensions to indicate claims and control writing to the master file.
You're right, you would want to serialize each road object to its own file. The Master File would be the serialization of a collection object that holds all of these individual road objects.
The users select and open these road files. Before opening the file, the user's app re-names the file, adding an extension (perhaps the user's id). This way, you can use directory scans to find claimed and unclaimed files.
The master file is only written to when the user releases their claim on the road they are working on. The user's app opens all the road files, assembles a master object using the road objects and then serializes this object into the master file. When finished, the users app releases the user's claim on the road file by renaming it.
Before writing to the master file, the user's app renames the file, indicating it is about to be written to. If an users app needs to write, it can check to see if the file is renamed, and wait for the file name to be restored to a writable name.
This is a sketch of how I would attack this spec. Good luck.