I have a plug in usb keyboard that I can just plug into my tablet. It works great for data entry. I don't know anything about windows tablets though, this is working for android. You need a usb port that is capable of being both a slave and a master. Most of them can do this these days -- if you send me the model number of the tablet I can look that up for you.
>1) Find a way to always keep the laptop and tablet synchronized. All the cloud storage services want to sell you something that does this. So does Dropbox. >2) Have both devices write a backup copy of the data to the server >whenever a change in the data occurs. This may be overkill. Plus it may not be what you want. You may be happier with 'the server gets the new data whenever I push it to there'. Or the cloud gets it then. >3) In case of wireless network failure, the software would realize >this and know that whenever connectivity is restored to write any data >that has changed in the interim. >4) The backup data on the server would have to be securely encrypted >against whatever hackers might try to to access or intercept the data. >(Hmm. What about the communications between the laptop and the >tablet?) If wireless, yes, if you are plugging your tablet into your laptop > >Is this a sensible way of approaching at least this one project? Of >course, I have not a clue as to how to do any of this (yet!). > >As always, many thanks in advance! > >P.S.: My wife has researched existing software and has found >everything lacking. She wants custom solutions to her custom needs. >Oh, joy. But very interesting! >-- >boB The idea is to use as much off the shelf technology to do what you want, and not reinvent the wheel. Especially when it comes to security issues that, worse case scenario, have all the parents suing you for not keeping things that are required to be private from being hacked. Before there was cloud computing, and smartphones, we wrote a client server app that handled the billing situation for the local energy company -- plus all their power outages, service apps etc, etc, etc. It took 4 of us nearly a year to get the permissions down right for all possible cases. Doing the same sort of thing for our mobile app using existing cloud libraries took about 3 weeks. Only some of that speedup was due to the fact that we knew what we were doing a lot better the second time around, and we had really extensive unit tests from the old way of doingf that we could slightly refactor and then make sure they passed under trhe new regime. You haven't picked yourself an easy one here ... One warning -- the trick to high speed performance for such things is to copy as little data as is needed from one device to another (and then let the devices regenerate a lot of what they need from the basic necessary set). But the trick for _developing_ and debugging such things is to send more information, including a bunch of handshaking things like 'I am trying to open the MongoDB Database now. Ok, that worked, now I am adding new job tickets ... and so on and so forth. If you do not do things like that, the time will come when you sit pointing at your server saying 'You aren't doing anything. Why aren't you doing <whatever it is you want it to do>?" Utterly frustrating. YOu need to build a verbose way into what you do so you can have your server tell you what it thinks it ought to be doing, and then a way to shut the server up when you go into production. But I would go google for cloud services that have data synchronisation. (Which is pretty much all of them, that being the point, after all). You want to build your app out of some of these ready made parts, or risk that your wife's students will all be in university before you are done with your app. Laura _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
