Hosting Your Apps

Overview

The application pages that form your REST applications receive requests from Aculab Cloud. These pages need to be hosted on a web server that is accessible from the internet. The choice of web server can depend on which of the high level wrappers you use to develop your applications.

Dedicated hosting or cloud computing providers (for example AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud) offer ways to run your web server so that it is available to the internet. If your server is protected by a NAT or firewall then ports will need to be opened so that requests from Aculab Cloud can reach your server.

If you don't have access to a server which can be accessed from the internet then tools such as ngrok or localtunnel can help. These allow you to expose a server which is behind a firewall or NAT to the internet. Do make sure you have permission from your network administrator if you use this type of tool.

Software Requirements

Depending on your choice of language your server will need to have particular software packages or services installed. The following briefly describes the general software requirements that you will need in order to run the sample applications distributed with the High Level REST API wrappers.

• JSON
• .Net
• Java
• Python
• PHP

• JSON

  You can serve JSON as text files with any web server.

  Web Server

  For Linux systems Apache and NGINX are widely used web servers which will serve JSON files.

  On Windows, Internet Information Services (IIS) is Microsoft's web server.

  On IIS the easiest way to serve text files is to add a '.txt' extension, eg quickstart.txt.

• .Net

  .Net is Microsoft's suite of programming languages and technologies. Microsoft also provides the Visual Studio IDE for developing .Net applications.

  We provide support for .Net version 4.5, 4.6 and 4.6.2

  Web Server

  Internet Information Services (IIS) is Microsoft's web server. The High Level REST API wrappers for .Net contain samples that can be easily added to an IIS installation.

• Java

  Java is a programming language and software platform supported on Windows and Linux.

  In order to run the High Level REST API wrappers you will need to have either the Java SE Runtime Environment 8 or Java SE Development Kit 8.

  Eclipse and NetBeans provide IDE tools for application development.

  Web Server

  The Java High Level REST API provides sample Java servlets which can be easily added to an Apache Tomcat web server installation.

• Python

  Python is supported on Windows and Linux. Python 2.7.9 or later is required

  Web Server

  For Linux systems Apache and NGINX are widely used web servers with support for Python applications

  Note: The example applications distributed with the High Level REST API wrapper are designed to be run in a standalone mode without requiring a web server.

• PHP

  PHP is supported on Windows and Linux. PHP version 7.0 or later is recommended

  Web Server

  For Linux systems Apache and NGINX are widely used web servers with support for PHP applications