A Quick Guide to Security with Vaadin Fusion and Spring Boot
Building a web application involves a lot of moving pieces. You have a backend server handling API calls, a frontend application running business logic, and you need to somehow make sure both are in sync and secure. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to use Vaadin Fusion, Spring Boot, and Okta to create a full-stack web application with authentication. Specifically, you’ll learn how to: Create a Spring Boot-based Vaadin Fusion app Secure server endpoints...
OAuth Sketch Notes - Live Q&A
Why do we need PKCE in OAuth? How does PKCE work? What’s the difference between the front channel and back channel? Can SPAs even use a back channel? These are just a few of the things we talked about during this sketch notes livestream! Developer advocates Lee Brandt and Aaron Parecki discuss PKCE, cross-site scripting, OAuth vs OpenID Connect and more, all while David Neal sketched notes live! Some of the other topics covered include...
Protecting a Laravel API with JWT
With the increasing popularity of single-page apps and the growing API economy, JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are becoming a very popular method for authenticating users. Rather than relying on the server to store the user’s state, JWTs encode information in a keyed payload stored on the client. JWTs are not inherently less secure than server-side session storage. But developers should understand the tradeoffs and know what to do if a JWT is compromised. You should...
Five Engineering Stories That Will Make Your Blood Curdle
If you’ve been an engineer for any considerable time, you’ve probably made some mistakes that made you want to crawl under your desk and hide. You may have even considered packing up your desk! In the spirit of the greatest holiday ever (Halloween), the Developer Advocacy group at Okta has shared some of their scariest engineering stories. Exploit Explorer Back when I still ran my own physical servers, 10 or more years ago, the word...
Develop Secure Apps with WebSockets and Node.js
WebSockets is a technology for communicating between the client and the server in a web application, where an open socket creates a persistent connection between the client and the server. This method of communication works outside of the HTTP request/response paradigm that has existed since the earliest days of the internet. Since sockets don’t use HTTP they can eliminate the overhead that comes with HTTP for low latency communications. In this tutorial, you will learn...
Why I Love IntelliJ IDEA for Java Development
If you’re a Java developer like me, you like to crank out code and get shit done. I like many things about IntelliJ IDEA, but I thought it’d be fun to write about the ones that make me most productive. First, a bit of my development history. When I first started doing Java development in the late 90s, I used HomeSite as my editor. HomeSite was an HTML editor initially developed by Nick Bradbury. I...
How to Authenticate with SAML in ASP.NET Core and C#
Security Assertion Markup Language, more commonly known as SAML, is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties. Most commonly these parties are an Identity Provider and a Service Provider. The primary use case for SAML has typically been to provide single sign-on (SSO) for users to applications within an enterprise/workforce environment. Up until the past few years, SAML was considered the industry standard—and proven workhorse—for passing an authenticated user into applications...
Setup a Mute Indicator Light for Zoom with Hammerspoon
In this post, I’m going to show you how to set up a light that will turn on when you’re in a Zoom call. The color of the light will show your mute status, red will indicate that you’re muted, and green if you are not muted. Because Zoom doesn’t provide a native interface for determining mute status, I will instead use a tool called Hammerspoon to accomplish this. Note: Unlike most software for macOS,...
Build a Video Chat Service with JavaScript, WebRTC, and Okta
If you are familiar with any sort of real-time communications over the internet such as GoToMeeting, Google Meet, or Discord then chances are you have used WebRTC. WebRTC is an open framework for handling real-time communications. It supports video, voice, or any data between peers. WebRTC is supported by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and many others. In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a web application that allows a user to broadcast their...
Create a Secure Ktor Application with Kotlin
In this tutorial, you will build your very own Nano Blogging Service (nabl for short) using a modern JVM stack. This includes using the Kotlin programming language, the Ktor web framework, and securing it with Okta. Users can log in or sign up, post updates, and browse specific or global chronological feed without advertisements. The blogging service displays posts from the selected user or everyone in the chronological feed. Kotlin is often considered a “better...