Simple Authentication with Rails and OmniAuth
Today I’m going to show you how to authenticate users into your Rails applications using the latest best-practices and a hosted authentication/authorization provider which makes managing users simple. Specifically, you’ll learn how to integrate Rails and Okta to create, manage, and secure users with OpenID Connect. To make this all work, you’ll be using one of the most popular gems in the Rails world: OmniAuth. Additionally, you’ll be using the fabulous devise gem to make...
Build a Desktop App with Electron and Authentication
Electron is a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It was created for GitHub’s Atom editor and has achieved widespread adoption since. Electron powers several apps that I use on a daily basis: Slack, Kitematic, and Visual Studio Code to name a few. Electron 2.0 was released in early May 2018, along with changes to the project to adhere to strict semantic versioning. This is good news...
How to Get More Internet Users to Enable 2FA on Their Accounts
If you are reading this article on the Okta Developer blog, chances are high that you are already quite familiar with two-factor authentication (2FA) and how it helps keep hackers out of user accounts even if they’re using compromised passwords. You probably already have 2FA enabled on all of your online accounts. Sadly, you are in the significant minority. Most People are Not Using 2FA Duo Security conducted a survey to research perceptions and adoption...
Build and Understand Express Middleware through Examples
If you’ve done any significant Node development in the past seven or eight years, you’ve probably used Express to build a web server at some point. While you can create a server in Node without using a library, it doesn’t give you a lot out of the box and can be quite cumbersome to add functionality. Express is a minimalist, “unopinionated” server library and has become the de facto standard for building web apps in...
Build a Java REST API with Java EE and OIDC
Java EE allows you to build Java REST APIs quickly and easily with JAX-RS and JPA. Java EE is an umbrella standards specification that describes a number of Java technologies, including EJB, JPA, JAX-RS, and many others. It was originally designed to allow portability between Java application servers, and flourished in the early 2000s. Back then, application servers were all the rage and provided by many well-known companies such as IBM, BEA, and Sun. JBoss...
Build a Basic CRUD App in Android with Kotlin
Kotlin was recently given official Android support status by Google, but it remains difficult to understand for many developers. The best way to start is by creating a complete app yourself, which you’ll do in this tutorial. In this tutorial, you’ll use Spring Boot for the API that powers your Android (+ Kotlin) mobile app. Spring Boot is a great way to create a robust REST API with a minimal amount of code. I’m going...
Build a Simple CRUD App with ASP.NET Framework 4.x Web API and Vue
ASP.NET Web API was released in 2012. Today, it’s a mature framework for building ReST-ful APIs to back any modern app. It pairs nicely with the newcomer on the client-side block, Vue In this tutorial, you’ll use Vue with .NET Framework 4.7.1 Web API and Visual Studio 2017 to build a simple CRUD app to track your weight and achieve your fitness goals, but really you could use these technologies to do just about anything....
Hey, Okta! Where's the Bacon?
I am so excited to announce I have joined Okta’s developer relations team as a Senior Developer Advocate! My focus is on all the JavaScripts: Node.js, Vue, React, and a bazillion other things! My Origin Story My first taste of programming was BASIC on the TRS-80. In the 90’s, I wrote a lot of DOS and Windows applications using Pascal and Visual Basic. Around 1998, I made the jump to building Web applications using “classic”...
Build a One-time Password Token for MFA with Okta
Okta has a great multi-factor authentication (MFA) service that you can use right away with a free developer account. It provides additional security by requiring a second factor after authentication and supports a variety of factor types including SMS, soft tokens like Google Authenticator, hard tokens like Yubikey and the Okta Verify soft token with push notification. Google Authenticator and Okta Verify are a type of factor called time-based one-time password (TOTP) tokens. They use...
Secure Your ASP.NET Web Forms Application with OpenID Connect and Okta
We talk a lot about ASP.NET Core on this blog, but the .NET ecosystem is much much more than just Core. Microsoft is still updating and supporting .NET Framework, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The same is the case with Web Forms, which even got some new features recently. In this post, we’ll take a look at how to easily secure existing ASP.NET Web Forms with via an external provider...