Over the weekend I had what at first appeared to be a small challenge: send out a few hundreds e-mails for a non-profit's outreach campaign. MailChimp and other mailings lists were not a good fit, as these messages were of the cold-call variety, and a formal mailing list felt too spammy. Initially I wrote a utility in .NET, but ended up solving with Node.js instead due to timeouts experienced with SmtpClient.
Back in October I started playing around with a few technologies, resulting in my first code posted to GitHub: safnetDirectory. I must say that it is not the most impressive bit of coding that I've ever done. However, the urge to learn sometimes needs an unencumbered, no-strings-attached, digital canvas on which to exercise. That urge is requited through the experimentation and the lessons learned, rather than the completion of an opus.
The end result: I have a prototype of a mixed Angular.Js / ASP.Net MVC application that provides a simple directory and simple administrative functionality. And it is Hosted on Azure.
Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.
Time to turn that Node.js test green. In Part 2, I succeeded in publishing a message to RabbitMQ using Node.js. However, my automated test failed: the .Net test runner could not handle the generated message. Three key elements were missing, which are required for the MassTransit .Net library to interpret the message correctly:
Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.
And now, I finally get back to blogging about the ASP.Net Web API code that I wrote for this head-to-head comparison of REST service and message bus integration. The official tutorials were my guide for Web API, and as with the test runner in part 1, I used MassTransit as a convenient library for publishing from .Net code to RabbitMQ. Owin was my solution for self-hosting the web application.
Many social websites, and web-based applications, have a notification process where the server sends a signal back to the browser, informing that particular user that there is a message. "You've got mail," as America On-Line used to say it. Consider the picture below, from Twitter, which shows that I have one new notification. That number increments automatically when a new notification arrives, without having to reload the full page. How does that work? Well, this blog post doesn't try to answer that directly. In fact, it is simply a collection of notes pointing out how to use Microsoft's SignalR technology to achieve this.
Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.
This is part two in a series. Part 1.
Let's start with Node.js. I already let you in on the fact that formatting a message for .Net to pick it up is tricky, and I won't get into the detail of that yet. For now, let's concentrate on setting up node.js and communicating with RabbitMQ. We'll get the finer points of interacting with .Net later.
Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ. Naturally, such a test does nothing to prove that one framework is generally faster than the other, but it is a fun exercise nonetheless.
Thus the challenge is this: accept a string message via POST, forward it to the
service bus, and return HTTP Status Code 202 (Accepted) along with an
acknowledgment that repeats the original message. Both REST services should be
self-hosted; free from additional cruft like error-handling*; and should utilize
an url like http://localhost:port/Message/mymessage, where "mymessage" is the
string to be sent across the bus.
Basic was the first language I learned. Well, partially, in 8th grade. On Apple IIe at school and a Packard Bell 386 PC at home. A few years later, JavaScript came out and it became the first "modern" language I used. As an undergraduate physics major, I found it useful for quickly generating sample data or running some numerical approximations (simpler than Mathematica). Then I wrote a few web minor pages with DOM manipulation, before any of the modern frameworks had come out. I went to work, used it occasionally, but never had any excuses in work or home life to do more than dabble. The revolution was passing me by.
Need to move rows up and down, and from one table to another, in an HTML page.
careful use of jQuery. There are probably many different solutions already out there, but I wanted to learn how to write one for myself. Key functions: closest, detach, append, prev, next, before, and after.
