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Choosing Between SaaS and a Custom Website

By Greg Hanson
May 18, 2021

Photo by Daniel McCullough

So you need a website, but you’re not sure whether you want to pay for a website provided as software as a service (SaaS), or build a custom website and host it.

The options are plentiful, as are the reasons for building a website in the first place. The purpose of this article is not to put forward specific packages or providers for consideration, rather I want to discuss how you might make that decision more objectively. Also, this discussion is for a commercial website, not a personal website or blog.

Here at End Point, we receive many inquiries asking for new websites. We are well equipped to help you work through this process, and are happy to do so. But for those of you who want to “go it alone”, or if you just want to be better prepared before giving us a call, read on for some things to consider as you make a pros & ​cons list for SaaS vs. custom websites.

While deciding between a SaaS offering and a custom build carries unlimited considerations, here are a few main points to help you narrow down the field.

Experience

The foremost factor that you should consider for your pros & cons list is your experience. This may come as a little bit …

End Point Relocates Its Tennessee Office

By Cody Ressler
May 14, 2021

After having been located in Bluff City for close to eight years, End Point is pleased to announce that it has recently relocated its Tennessee office to Johnson City. The new location is an improved facility that better serves our Liquid Galaxy team. A group of veteran End Pointers including Matt Vollrath, Neil Elliot, and Josh Ausborne are working out of the new location, alongside more recent employees Josh Harless and myself.

Our Tennessee office has an important role in providing remote access to various Liquid Galaxy platforms so that other End Point engineers can work on them. Johnson City has recently begun a fiber internet initiative through its power company, BrightRidge. We were lucky enough to be in the first wave of installations and got cables run underground to our office so that we can enjoy speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (gigabit).

This office is where we test new content, features, updates, or entirely new designs. The interior design includes plenty of space to concentrate on individual work, as well as for test systems and preparing new units for shipment. It is also well-suited for collaborative work with both onsite and remote teammates on R&D, content …

Integrating Laravel With a React Frontend

By Daniel Gomm
May 7, 2021

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Frontend frameworks can be useful, and provide a lot of advantages over server-side rendering of views. It’s not uncommon now for websites to be purely presentational frontend applications. Thankfully Laravel provides some helpers for including a dedicated frontend, including a fantastic npm package, laravel-mix, which heavily simplifies the use of webpack.

In this article I’ll go over how to set up a new Laravel application to work with React as its frontend. While this article may focus on React, the main issues are the same regardless of framework. You’ll need to:

• Add your JavaScript application to the project’s file system and set up a build process for the frontend sources
• Write some additional code to bootstrap your frontend application once the page has loaded
• Carefully set up URL conventions to distinguish between frontend and backend routes.

Scaffolding The Frontend

In a standard Laravel 8 application (created using composer create-project laravel/laravel <NAME>), the frontend JS application is stored in the /resources/js folder. Laravel provides a helper package called laravel/ui, which can be used to scaffold the frontend with …

What is serialization?

By Zed Jensen
May 6, 2021

Photo by Brian Patrick Tagalog on Unsplash

Serialization is a process used constantly by most applications today. However, there are some common misconceptions and misunderstandings about what it is and how it works; I hope to clear up a few of these in this post. I’ll be talking specifically about serialization and not marshalling, a related process.

What is serialization?

Most developers know that complex objects need to be transformed into another format before they can be sent to a server, but many might not be aware that every time they print an object in the Python or JavaScript console, the same type of thing is happening. Variables and objects as they’re stored in memory—either in a headless program or one with developer tools attached—are not really usable to us humans.

Data serialization is the process of taking an object in memory and translating it to another format. This may entail encoding the information as a chunk of binary to store in a database, creating a string representation that a human can understand, or saving a config file from the options a user selected in an application. The reverse—deserialization—takes an object in one of these formats and converts it …

3 Immediate Benefits of Google Analytics for Business Owners

By Ben Witten
April 30, 2021

Image from Google’s marketing platform blog

Where is your traffic coming from? What drew the traffic to your website? Which parts of your website are most visited? How do visits change over time? And how can the answers to these questions help you?

Answering such questions and doing something about it is called search engine optimization (SEO).

To help you with this is Google Analytics, a web analytics service that lets you track and understand your website traffic. It is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes that are looking to grow.

Here are three ways Google Analytics can benefit your business:

Determining Site Improvements to Strengthen Website Flow

This is a great way to generate more “conversions” — visitors to your website taking a desired action. Are visitors behaving the way you expected them to? Can you observe any bottlenecks in audience flow?

Bottlenecks include traffic getting stuck on one page, when you want them to be going to a different one, like a contact page. Understanding how traffic gets stuck might point you toward the need to refresh certain web pages, which could in turn lead to more conversions.

For example, we observed that our “Deployment …

Enumerated Types in Rails and PostgreSQL

By Patrick Lewis
April 29, 2021

Photo by Jared Tarbell, used under CC BY 2.0, cropped from original.

Enumerated types are a useful programming tool when dealing with variables that have a predefined, limited set of potential values. An example of an enumerated type from Wikipedia is “the four suits in a deck of playing cards may be four enumerators named Club, Diamond, Heart, and Spade, belonging to an enumerated type named suit”.

I use enumerated types in my Rails applications most often for model attributes like “status” or “category”. Rails’ implementation of enumerated types in ActiveRecord::Enum provides a way to define sets of enumerated types and automatically makes some convenient methods available on models for working with enumerated attributes. The simple syntax does belie some potential pitfalls when it comes to longer-term maintenance of applications, however, and as I’ll describe later in this post, I would caution against using this basic 1-line syntax in most cases:

enum status: [:active, :archived]

The Rails implementation of enumerated types maps values to integers in database rows by default. This can be surprising the first time it is encountered, as a Rails developer looking to store status …

Automating Windows Service Installation

By Daniel Gomm
April 23, 2021

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

For me, setting up a service started as a clean one-liner that used InstallUtil.exe, but as time went on, I accumulated additional steps. Adding external files & folders, setting a custom Service Logon Account, and even an SSL cert had to be configured first before the service could be used. An entire checklist was needed just to make sure the service would start successfully. That’s when I realized a proper installation method was needed here. This article will go over how to make a dedicated .msi installer for a Windows Service that can do all these things and more.

Creating an installer can be tricky, because not all the available features are easy to find. In fact, the setup project itself is not included by default in Visual Studio; you need to install an extension in order to create one. But once the installer is created, we can use it to do things like:

• Configure the installer to copy the build output of a project to the C:\Program Files (x86) folder, as well as add custom files & folders to the installation
• Add custom CLI flags to the installer to specify the Service Logon Account at install time
• Add an installer class to the …

GStreamer Nvenc for Ubuntu 20.04

By Neil Elliott
April 22, 2021

Image by Martin Adams on Unsplash

GStreamer is a library for creating media-handling components. Using GStreamer you can screencast your desktop, transcode a live stream, or write a media player application for your kiosk.

Video encoding is expensive, even with AMD’s current lineup making it more palatable. Recent Nvidia Quadro and GeForce video cards include dedicated H.264 encoding and decoding hardware as a set of discrete components alongside the GPU. The hardware is used in the popular Shadowplay toolkit on Windows and available to developers through the Nvidia Video SDK on Linux.

GStreamer includes elements as part of the “GStreamer Bad” plugin set that leverages the SDK without having to get your hands too dirty. The plugins are not included with gst-plugins-bad in apt, and must be compiled with supporting libraries from Nvidia. Previously this required registering with Nvidia and downloading the Nvidia Video SDK, but Ubuntu recently added apt packages providing them, a big help for automation.

Environment

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• Video card from GPU support matrix
• GStreamer

CUDA

The nvenc and nvdec plugins depend on CUDA 11. The apt version is too old. I’ve found the runfile to …