Java REST API Showdown: Which is the Best Framework on the Market?
Developing services in Java, including REST APIs, wasn’t always easy or productive until Spring came along and changed the landscape. Many years have passed since then, and new frameworks have emerged in the community. One of these frameworks was Micronaut. It’s developed by OCI, the same company behind Grails, and their goal is to help developers create microservices and serverless applications. There is also Quarkus, another framework that gained popularity over the last year. Developed...
Secure Legacy Apps with Spring Cloud Gateway
One of the biggest challenges of adding OAuth 2.0 support to legacy applications is a lack of support in the underlying framework. Maybe it’s homegrown, or maybe it’s just old? Either way, migrating away from an old form-based login doesn’t need to be so painful. In this post, I’ll walk you through a low-code option using Spring Cloud Gateway and Okta. You’ll learn how to setup Spring Cloud Gateway running as a stand-alone application that...
Build a CRUD App with Angular 9 and Spring Boot 2.2
Angular is a web framework for building mobile and desktop applications. Its first version, AngularJS, was one of the first JavaScript MVC frameworks to dominate the web landscape. Developers loved it, and it rose to popularity in the early 2010s. AngularJS 1.0 was released on June 14, 2014. Angular 9 was recently released, giving Angular quite a successful run in the land of web frameworks. Spring Boot is one of the most popular frameworks for...
Use MongoDB in Your C# ASP.NET Apps
MongoDB is a document database. Instead of storing data in tables and rows, you store documents in a structure very similar to objects in the memory of your application. The schema is flexible and dynamic. You don’t need to define all fields upfront. Some MongoDB tutorials define model classes in C# and show how to read from and write to the database with them. This post takes a different approach, which also demonstrates how flexible...
Build a Secure REST Application Using Jersey
REST is one of the most used architectural styles when it comes to developing web services. In Java, we have the JAX-RS specification that defines how to create a RESTful application. To show the power of the spec, Jersey, the reference implementation of JAX-RS was created. Building JAX-RS endpoints only requires adding annotations to your code. Keep reading to see how easy it is! In this tutorial you’ll create a TODO list service that will...
Add Docker to Your Spring Boot Application
Docker enables you to deploy a server environment in containers. A container is a standardized unit of software that assembles code, runtime, dependencies, settings, and initialization in a single package that you can run reliably from one computing environment to another. Deploying your app as a Docker container is not hard, and can alleviate a lot of problems that you may encounter when moving your app around the multiple environments it has to go, like...
Build a CRUD API with Java and MongoDB
This tutorial leverages two technologies that are commonly used to build web services: MongoDB and Java (we’ll actually use Spring Boot). MongoDB is a NoSQL database, which is a generic term for any non-relational databases and differentiates them from relational databases. Relational databases, such as SQL, MySQL, Postgres, etc…, store data in large tables with well-defined structures. These structures are strong and tight and not easily changed or customized on a per-record basis (this structure...
Use Okta Token Hooks to Supercharge OpenID Connect
OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OAuth 2.0 are already recognized as powerful tools for incorporating authentication and authorization into modern web applications. Okta has enhanced the capabilities of these standards by introducing our Inline Hooks feature. There are a number of different types of inline hooks that Okta supports. In this post, I focus on hooks that allow you to patch information into the tokens you get back from Okta via OIDC and OAuth. You’ll first...
Five Tools to Improve Your Java Code
Writing quality code takes practice. To write better code, you need to know what should improve. Code quality and what makes code easy to read are very subjective; ask five different developers, you will get six different answers. For this post, I’ll avoid most of the subjective and focus on ways to detect real issues and potential bugs. I wrote some intentionally bad code to demo these tools (which was harder than you might think)....
Multi-Factor Authentication Sucks
For the last seven years or so I’ve been building developer tools to help make user authentication and authorization simpler and more secure. When I’m not building tools to help secure web applications, I’m often writing articles, creating videos, and educating developers on web security best practices. I care a lot about web security. With that said (and I almost feel guilty admitting this), I think multi-factor authentication (MFA) sucks. It’s slow, annoying, frustrating, and...