Create a Secure Spring REST API
“If it is useful, it will be modified.” Those words of wisdom came from a QA teacher of mine, to explain that all software evolves when it becomes useful to someone, and for as long as it is useful. We all know this. Users ask us for new features, bug fixes and changes in domain logic every day. As any project (especially a monolith) grows it can begin to become difficult to maintain, and the...
OAuth 2.0 for Native and Mobile Apps
These days, when you hear someone talking about OAuth, it is likely they mean OAuth 2.0. Previous versions of the standard are deprecated. OAuth is an authorization framework that enables you to work with external systems in a secure way using digital identifiers called tokens. One type of token is called an access token. Its function is to allow you to exercise APIs securely. The API service can use the access token to determine if...
Build a Basic App with Spring Boot and JPA using PostgreSQL
Every non-trivial application needs a way to save and update data: a resource server that is accessible via HTTP. Generally, this data must be secured. Java is a great language with decades of history in professional, enterprise development, and is a great choice for any application’s server stack. Within the Java ecosystem, Spring makes building secure resource servers for your data simple. When coupled with Okta, you get professionally maintained OAuth and JWT technologies easily...
Learning Java as a First Language
I started programming in Java way back in 1999. I had just started a job as the director of web development at a small startup called eDeploy.com. I wrote a lot of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a SaaS product that helped companies install network equipment. The backend for our app was written in Java and we deployed to iPlanet Application Server. At our height, we trusted Loudcloud to run our software. I experienced a...
Navigating the ASP.NET Core Identity Landscape
These days, users of web application expect a personalized, secure experience. They want to make sure that they can easily get to their own information, and that no one else can access it. Developers of these web applications want a simple way to manage users and be assured that they have secured their users’ information from prying eyes. For developers of web applications written in ASP.NET Core, there are several choices for managing user identities....
Build a Basic CRUD App with Laravel and React
Laravel is an amazing web application framework which regularly tops the lists of best PHP frameworks available today. This is partly because its based on PHP which runs 80% of the web today and the learning curve is relatively small (despite it being packed with advanced features, you can understand the basic concepts easily). However, the real reason for its popularity is its robust ecosystem and abundance of high-quality learning resources available for free (like...
Configure .NET Authentication in OWIN
The Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) is a standard that defines the interface between a web application and a web server. Prior to this standard in .NET, there was a tight coupling between .NET applications and Internet Information Server (IIS), which led to great difficulties when trying to expand to different web application/server technologies. The introduction of OWIN has created an abstraction between application and server that completely decouples one from the other. Thanks...
Angular 7: What's New and Noteworthy + OIDC Goodness
Angular 7 was released earlier this quarter and I’m pumped about a few of its features. If you’ve been following Angular since Angular 2, you know that upgrading can sometimes be a pain. There was no Angular 3, but upgrading to Angular 4 wasn’t too bad, aside from a bunch of changes in Angular’s testing infrastructure. Angular 4 to Angular 5 was painless, and 5 to 6 only required changes to classes that used RxJS....
Bootiful Development with Spring Boot and Vue
Vue is a web framework that’s gotten a lot of attention lately because it’s lean and mean. Its baseline framework cost is around 40K and is known as a minimalistic web framework. With all of the recent attention on web performance and mobile-first, mobile-fast, it’s no surprise that Vue has become more and more popular. If you spent the time to learn AngularJS back in the day, chances are you’ll find an old friend in...
Build a Simple Web App with Express, Angular, and GraphQL
During the past 10 years or so, the concept of REST APIs for web services has become the bread and butter for most web developers. Recently a new concept has emerged, GraphQL. GraphQL is a query language that was invented by Facebook and released to the public in 2015. During the last three years, it has created quite a stir. Some regard it as a new revolutionary way of creating web APIs. The main difference...