Build a REST API with Node and Postgres
If you haven’t heard of PostgreSQL (often called Postgres), today’s your lucky day. It’s a robust, open source relational database that powers some of the world’s largest applications. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a REST API in Node that uses Postgres as a data store. I’ll walk you through setting everything up, so if you’re not familiar with Postgres, don’t worry. Specifically, I’m going to walk you through building an API...
Build a CRUD App with ASP.NET Core and TypeScript
There are a lot of things for .NET developers to love about TypeScript. It has strong typing that .NET Developers are used to and the ability to use the latest JavaScript features. Since it is just a superset of JavaScript, the cost to switch is almost nothing. Getting Visual Studio to transpile the TypeScript when it builds your ASP.NET Core app is pretty simple as well. In this tutorial, you will build an ASP.NET Core...
Visual Studio 2019 Tips and Tricks
Microsoft recently released the preview of Visual Studio 2019 for Windows, and it’s got lots of improvements and features! After reading the release notes, I reached out to Allison Buchholtz-Au and Kendra Havens on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft to get an idea of what features should be configured immediately after downloading and installing this shiny new IDE. After they showed me a couple of quick tips, VS 2019 started to feel like the...
Build a CRUD App with Python, Flask, and Angular
Developers all have their favorite GitHub repositories. They have software projects that they love and watch closely for the latest changes. In this tutorial, you’ll create a simple CRUD application to save and to display your favorite GitHub open source projects. You will use Angular to implement the user interface features and Python for the backend. These days it is not uncommon to have an API that is responsible not only for persisting data to...
Build Secure Microservices with AWS Lambda and ASP.NET Core
Microservices are fun to build and offer us a scalable path to overcoming problems with tightly coupled dependencies that plague monolithic applications. This post will walk you through building an AWS Lambda microservice written in C# with .NET Core 2.1, and communicating in JSON. We’re bringing together multiple exciting technologies here - microservices, serverless API via AWS Lambda, and authentication using Okta’s easy and convenient identity provider. Each of these technologies is deserving of their...
Linking Your Alexa Skill Securely with Okta
We are moving toward a ‘SMART’ world where everything is interconnected and almost all things or devices are interactive. From a gesture-driven by an actual human being to automated interactions from another device or application, a lot of developers and even non-computer savvy users are trying to explore this space. In this post, I will use Amazon’s Alexa which is Amazon’s voice-enabled and command Virtual Assistant as an example. I’ll show how you can make...
Build a Desktop Application with Angular and Electron
So, you have been learning all about web technologies including JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The advantage of web technologies is, of course, that the same software can be used on many different platforms. But this advantage comes with a number of problems. Web applications have to be run inside a browser and the interoperability with the operating system is limited. Direct access to features of the operating system is usually the domain for desktop applications....
A Beginner's Guide to Redux
React has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years, and Redux is a term often heard in combination with it. While technically separate concepts, they do work quite nicely together. React is a component-based framework, often used to create a Single-Page App (SPA), but can also be used to add any amount of independent components to any website. Redux is a state management system with a great set of dev tools useful...
Build a REST API with ASP.NET Web API
Do you need to build a REST API with ASP.NET Web API? If you’re creating a new API, you should probably create it with .NET Core. But it’s not always possible to use the latest and greatest technologies. If you’re working in an existing ASP.NET 4.x app, or the organization you work for hasn’t approved the use of .NET Core yet, you may need to build an API in .NET Framework 4.x. That is what...
A Quick Guide to OAuth 2.0 with Spring Security
When building a web application, authentication and authorization is a must. Doing it right, however, is not simple. Computer security is a true specialty. Legions of developers work day and night against equally numerous international hackers creating a continual development cycle of finding vulnerabilities, attacking them, and fixing them. Keeping up with all this solo would be painful (if not impossible). Fortunately, there’s no need. Spring Security and Spring Boot have made implementing a web...