Our Blog

Integrating the Estes Freight Shipping SOAP API as a Spree Shipping Calculator

By Patrick Lewis
September 28, 2021

One of our clients with a Spree-based e-commerce site was interested in providing automated shipping quotes to their customers using their freight carrier Estes. After doing some research I found that Estes provided a variety of SOAP APIs and determined a method for extending Spree with custom shipping rate calculators. This presented an interesting challenge to me on several levels: most of my previous API integration experience was with REST, not SOAP APIs, and I had not previously worked on custom shipping calculators for Spree. Fortunately, the Estes SOAP API documentation and some code examples of other Spree shipping calculators were all I needed to create a successful integration of the freight shipping API for this client.

Estes API Documentation

The Estes Rate Quote Web Service API is the one that I relied on for being able to generate shipping quotes based on a combination of source address, destination address, and package weight. I found the developer documentation to be thorough and helpful, and was able to create working client code to send a request and receive a response relatively quickly. Many optional fields can be provided when making requests but I found that …

Deploying a .NET 5 app on IIS

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
September 27, 2021

Photo by Christian Cable, CC BY 2.0

.NET 5 has been around for a few years now, after being released at .NET Conf 2020, containing the best of both worlds: .NET Core, including multi-platform support and several performance improvements, and .NET Framework, including Windows desktop development support with WPF and Windows Forms (UWP is also supported, but not officially yet).

A .NET Core-based project can be published into any platform (as long as we’re not depending on libraries targeted to .NET Framework), allowing us to save costs by hosting on Linux servers and increasing performance by having cheaper scalability options. But most developers are still using Windows with Internet Information Services (IIS) as the publishing target, likely due to the almost 20 years of history of .NET Framework, compared to the relatively short history of .NET Core, launched in 2016.

Our .NET project

We won’t review the steps needed to set up a new .NET 5 project, since this time we are only focusing on publishing what we already have developed. But to understand how our application will integrate with IIS and the framework, it’s important to note a fundamental change any .NET 5 project has in …

Monitoring Settings Changes in ASP.NET Core

By Daniel Gomm
September 22, 2021

Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash

Did you know you can directly respond to config file changes in ASP.NET Core? By using the IOptionsMonitor<T> interface, it’s possible to run a lambda function every time a config file is updated.

For those who aren’t too familiar with it, ASP.NET Core configuration is handled using the Options Pattern. That is, you create a model class that has a field for each property in your config file, and then set up the application to map the configuration to that class, which can be injected into controllers and services. In your controllers, you can request the configuration class T as a dependency by using an options wrapper class like IOptions<T>.

While this works just fine in some cases, it doesn’t allow you to actually run code when the configuration is changed. However, if you request your configuration using IOptionsMonitor<T>, you get the ability to define a lambda function to run every time appsettings.json is changed.

One use case for this functionality would be if you wanted to maintain a list in the config file, and log every time that list was changed. In this article I’ll explain how to set up an ASP.NET Core 5.0 API to run …

Introducing VisionPort Remote

By Alejandro Ramon
September 17, 2021

Welcome to End Point Liquid Galaxy’s new VisionPort Remote! This application not only allows the user to show their content on screen, but also gives control over Google Earth navigation through a number of touch actions. In addition to serving as a remote touchscreen of the system, Remote doubles as a portal that creators can use to test their content from their own devices. A new feature of Remote permits a shareable “guest view” allowing the presentation host to show their content without the possibility of a guest intervening.

Note: This interface layout is not final.

Why we created this

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the need for remote work, content, and presentations. Prior to the pandemic, the only way to use the Liquid Galaxy system was if you were in front of the display. The VisionPort Remote provides more flexibility and an ability to experience the system’s benefits from all over the world.

Who this benefits

The VisionPort remote helps content creators visualize the content that they are making without needing to be in front of the system, enables hands-free control of the Liquid Galaxy from any device, and allows for remote sharing of content to viewers who do not …

Lock down your security with GPG on a YubiKey

By Ardyn Majere
September 10, 2021

Photo by Mauro Sbicego on Unsplash

Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a tool we use a lot at End Point. Its ubiquity and quite decent security is a perfect fit for us — and there’s a way to make it even safer.

GPG uses the OpenPGP standard to encrypt files. Normally, one creates a PGP key on their computer and just keeps the keyfile safe. A password is generally used, but as with any private key, it’s only as safe as the computer it’s on.

Got a YubiKey and not sure what to do with it? Want to get a little more secure with your encryption?

In case you haven’t heard of them, YubiKeys are hardware USB keys that can be used as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) token, or to fill in one-time password (OTP) fields (like those generated by Google Authenticator) on sites that don’t support the YubiKey directly as an MFA token.

Using a smart card like a YubiKey can increase GPG’s security, especially if the key is generated on an air-gapped machine. This way the keyfile is stored in the hardware security token, and is never exposed to the internet.

In addition, you can even store an SSH key on the card, which will enable you to log in to remote Linux …

Video Conference Integration

By Alejandro Ramon
September 3, 2021

End Point’s Immersive and Geospatial Division is proud to announce the rollout of our new Video Conference Integration as an extension to the Liquid Galaxy platform’s capabilities.

Video Conference Integration allows a user to join Zoom calls or host meetings with a native, software-level view of the Liquid Galaxy. The necessary hardware and software configuration can be added to existing installations or included in a solution provided by our sales team.

Functionally, this allows users to remotely share and view the Liquid Galaxy through a high-definition live stream, giving end users the capability to test content remotely or join in on presentations from other offices. Furthermore, the participant view can be shared to the main display wall or to an integrated side screen so that presenters or members in the Liquid Galaxy room can see and interact with others in the meeting.

Our integration currently supports Zoom. We plan to support Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex in the future.

Why we created this

The need for flexibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic raised the question of how users could present to clients who were unable to travel or be present in-person. We …

Converting to Hugo

By Seth Jensen
August 23, 2021

We recently converted the End Point website from Middleman to Hugo. I’ll go into more detail shortly, but the general result has been much better build times with less configuration and better support for local development.

Background

In 2017 we converted this website from a Ruby on Rails app to a static site. With tons of high-quality static site generator options, we could implement the shiny features used by our Rails site in 2009 with less overhead and quicker load times.

We also wanted to move away from Blogger to self-hosting our blog, using GitHub issues for comments. We ended up switching to Middleman, a static site generator written in Ruby, and had a mostly positive experience. Ruby was a good fit switching from Rails, and (if I remember correctly) Middleman had pretty competitive performance.

With over 1000 blog posts at the time, as well as lots of other pages, our site was quite slow to build—3.5 minutes when building with the full blog.

Middleman had a nice development server, but due to some server-side rewrites, we couldn’t use it. Instead, we got around the build times by writing a simple Ruby script to generate an HTML preview, letting our blog authors see …

Full-text search on a budget: Xapian

By Marco Pessotto
August 19, 2021

Over the years I’ve seen and implemented different full-text search applications using various technologies: plain SQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Solr, and most recently Xapian.

While Solr and Elasticsearch are very well known, Xapian, despite the fact that it’s available and packaged in all the major GNU/Linux distributions, doesn’t seem to be so popular, at least not among project managers.

But Xapian is fast, advanced, can be configured to do faceted searches (so the user can filter the search results), and my favorite, is fast to build and has virtually no maintenance overhead.

Its main feature is that it’s not a stand-alone application, like Solr or Elasticsearch, but instead it’s a library written in C++ which has bindings for all the major languages (as advertised on its homepage). It has also great documentation.

Now, being in the e-commerce business, my typical use-case is that the client’s shop needs something faster and better than a search using a SQL query against the products table. And beware, even implementing a non-trivial SQL-based search can burn more hours than setting up Xapian.

With Xapian you can prototype very quickly, without losing hours wading through …