Tech Blog

I’m currently working on a JSON export from the Floorplanner and I’m glad I found the excelent JSON Validator made by arc90 lab. They made the debugging process a lot easier. Thanks guys!

Today, I have added a server switch to Floorplanner.com. Now, it will load the floorplanner elements from the server that is nearest to you, which can yield a significant improvement in the initial loading time of your floorplans.

To determine your location, your IP address is matched against a table of locations. This worked fine in our development version, but it didn’t work at all on the production server. After some searching, I found that our server configuration was causing this. We use Apache as our web server, which uses mod_proxy to send the request to our Mongrel cluster. This intermediary step caused the IP address that Rails would receive to always be the IP address of the Apache server: 127.0.0.1. Therefore, the location matching did not work.

However, I found that mod_proxy adds an additional header to the request with the original IP address: HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR. This header can be used for our purpose. Now, I use the following function to determine the correct IP address:

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def determine_ip(request)
  # use HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR if available
  # otherwise fall back to default header
  request.env["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] || request.remote_addr
end

On a related note: to match an IP address against ranges of IP addresses in our location table, it must be converted from a string (”1.2.3.4″) to a number (16909060). I use the following oneliner, which uses some nice functional programming tricks and an application of bit-shifting:

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def numeric_ip(ip_str)
  ip_str.split('.').inject(0) { |ip_num, part|
            ( ip_num << 8 ) + part.to_i }
end

Yes, I am really proud if this function!

UPDATE: I just found out that request.remote_ip does the same as my determine_ip-function. Unfortunately, it only works in Rails 2.0.

I wanted to get some data from a web service using Javascript. I looked at several Javascript classes (like this), but because the web service was running on another server it got a little troublesome. As a solution I tried to call the web service through a proxy, but that didn’t make it any easier.

Jaap suggested to take a look at NuSOAP, a -kinda old- SOAP toolkit for PHP. With an AJAX request I could call a PHP page that uses NuSOAP to consume the web service. It was actually easier then I thought it would be.

To make the AJAX call from Javascript I used Prototype and this script:

  function doRequest() {
    var url = "ajax/consume_webservice.php";
    var param1 = "value1";
    var param2 = "value2";
    var params = "param1="+ param1 +"&param2="+ param2;
 
    new Ajax.Request ( url, { method: 'POST', parameters: params,
      onComplete: onResult } );
  }
 
  function onResult( result ) {
    alert( result.responseText );
  }

The PHP file consume.php looks something like this:

< ?php
 
  $param1 = isset( $POST_['param1'] ) ? $POST_['param1'] : false;
  $param2 = isset( $POST_['param2'] ) ? $POST_['param2'] : false;
 
  // this is the only file I used from the NuSOAP project
  require_once( "nusoap.php" );
 
  $url = webserviceurl;
  $params = array( "param1" => $param1, "param2" => $param2 );
 
  $soap = new nusoap_client( $url, true, false, false, false, false, 0, 60 );
  $proxy = $soap->getProxy();
  $proxy->functionname( $params );
 
  echo $proxy->response;
 
?>

That’s all. Do a AJAX request from Javascript to a PHP page. Then the PHP page uses NuSOAP to consume the web service and returns the result. Back in Javascript you can do whatever you want with the given data.