What's New in Laravel 8
With Laravel 8’s release in September 2020, the popular PHP framework continues to offer new features and improvements. After version 5, Laravel moved to semantic versioning and the more frequent releases have meant smaller changes between each one. That said, there are still several exciting updates in this version of the framework. While Laravel will continue to offer security fixes for version 7 until early 2021, no more bug fixes will be released after October...
Spring Security SAML and Database Authentication
Spring Boot is a ubiquitous and well-supported suite of tools for developing web applications in Java. Database authentication, in which credentials identifying authorized users are stored in a database accessible by the application, is maybe the most common and straightforward method of authenticating users. SAML is a well-supported open standard for handling authentication between identity providers and service providers. Configuring SAML authentication in Spring Security is a common topic, and examples are easy to come...
Build a Modern API using Fastify and Node.js
Fastify is just as the name implies, fast. Not just in terms of development speed—its low overhead means the server is fast as well. When writing APIs, speed on both sides is paramount. Fastify is a web framework for Node.js that was designed for efficiency. Fastify is fully extensible with hooks, plugins, and decorators. It is schema-based, meaning you can define your response and request objects in your routes and have Fastify do the data...
Test in Production with Spring Security and Feature Flags
Okta is an Identity and Access Management platform. The TL;DR: you offload the responsibility for secure authentication and authorization to Okta so you can focus on the business logic of the app you’re building. Okta and Spring Boot already go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Add in feature flags care of Split, and you can test new capabilities for your app without having to redeploy. That’s testing in production the smart way! And, you...
Deploy a .NET Container with Azure DevOps
When I began programming (in the ’80s), computers weren’t equipped with a network card by default. The internet was almost unknown and modems were slow and noisy. The software was installed from stacks of flexible floppy disks. Today, computing resources are virtual. The internet is vital and there is an URL for everything. We live in the *aaS (* as a Service) era, where if you want something, there is likely one or more something...
Validating Okta Access Tokens in PHP using AWS API Gateway and Lambda Authorizers
Running REST APIs with AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway has recently become a very popular option. Although AWS provides its own mechanisms to add an authentication and authorization layer to these APIs, you may want to use your Okta centralized user database and credentials instead. Today we’ll talk about how you can use Okta as the authentication and authorization layer of your REST API hosted in AWS Lambda, validating Okta access tokens using a...
Easy Session Sharing in Spring Boot with Spring Session and MySQL
Session management in multi-node applications presents multiple challenges. When the architecture includes a load balancer, client requests might be routed to different servers each time, and the HTTP session might be lost. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the configuration of session sharing in a multi-node Spring Boot application. Prerequisites: Java 8+ Docker Docker Compose Table of Contents Session Persistence Session Sharing with Spring Session Learn More about Spring Session and OAuth 2.0 Session...
How to Build Securely with Blazor WebAssembly (WASM)
Last month I came out with a video tutorial on Blazor WebAssembly and I thought it would be good to follow up with a written tutorial as well. Youtube Link Because of the JS Interop, Blazor WASM has some key differences in the world of OAuth. Instead of thinking of this as a normal .NET back end application, you have to think of what Blazor resolves to in the browser - and that’s Javascript. Therefore,...
How to Adapt Your .NET App for SameSite
Have you run across an error message vaguely referencing SameSite in your .NET Apps? Read on, it’s time for a change to your code - and I’ll explain why. I like cookies, both the custard stuffed and the dry ones (which I use to dunk in my coffee or tea). This post is very much about cookies - only not the delicious, culinary ones. As in many other cases (think of the web, for example),...
Easy Authentication for Ruby On Rails Login
A couple of things have changed in the Rails world since we published our last blog post on Rails. For one, Rails 6.0 was released on August 16, 2019 (Yay progress!), and, for another, Omniauth had a CRSF vulnerability reported (not so great). Does this make you a bit anxious? Don’t worry! Today we will be going over how to create a Rails app from scratch with the new Rails release and go over how...