Use OpenID Connect to Build a Simple Node.js Website
If you’ve ever spent time trying to figure out the best way to handle user authentication for your Node app and been confused: you’re not alone. Over the last few years, authentication practices have changed quite a bit. Today I’m going to show you how to use OpenID Connect to build an extremely simple Node.js website (using Express.js) that allows you to manage your users, log them in, and log them out. Websites used to...
Build a Preact App with Authentication
React is a fast, and lightweight library, which has led to fast adoption across the SPA (single-page app) ecosystem. Preact is an even lighter-and-faster alternative to React, weighing in at a measly 3kb! For less complex applications, it can be a great choice. In this tutorial, you’ll build a basic Preact application with a couple of pages and user authentication using the Okta Sign-In Widget. Bootstrap Your App With PreactCLI To get your project started,...
Add the Power of Webhooks to Your App with Okta's System Log
UPDATE: Since this article was written we’ve released official webhook support in Okta! If you’d like to see an easier way to handle webhooks in Okta, please check out our new docs. If you’ve used webhooks before, you probably understand the magical powers they boast. Do you want to build a sleep tracker for your dog? Get notified when it’s going to rain? Or maybe have new Eventbrite attendees automatically added to Salesforce? You can...
Add Role-Based Access Control to Your App with Spring Security and Thymeleaf
User management functions are required by a wide variety of apps and APIs, and it’s a common use-case to partition access to parts of an application according to roles assigned to a user. This is the basis of role-based access control (RBAC). Okta manages these roles with groups. Users can belong to one or more groups. With the Okta Spring Security integration, these groups are automatically mapped to roles that can be called out in...
Why Are Webhooks Better Than Serverless Extensibility?
When you’ve built a successful software-as-a-service product, you tend to run into interesting technical (and business) questions. My favorite question is: “How do we add more functionality to our platform faster?” It’s an interesting question because everyone wants to build features faster. In a perfect world, you’d be able to hire 100,000 engineers, split them into teams of four (with no managers!), and have each team own a feature: spec it out, build it, iterate...
A Developer's Guide To Docker - Docker Compose
Good developers care as much about efficiency as they do about writing clean code. Containerization can add efficiency to both your workflow and your application, and has thus become all the rage among modern dev. And, as a good developer, you know that manually creating containers from images using docker run ... or even using the Dockerfile to create containers is less than ideal. How would you like to have one command that tells Docker...
NoSQL Options for Java Developers, Part II
Last month, I wrote about NoSQL Options for Java Developers. I analyzed the data available from a variety of sources (Indeed jobs, GitHub stars, Stack Overflow tags) to pick the top five options: MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, Neo4j, and PostgreSQL. After writing this article, I shared it with a few experts I know in the Java and NoSQL communities and asked them the following questions: Do you agree with my choices of the top 5 NoSQL...
User Authorization in ASP.NET Core with Okta
Authorization is the oft-forgotten piece of identity and access management. The fact is, almost every app needs more than just “are they signed in?” for authorization. Most times, you need to not only know who “they” are, but what access they are supposed to have. For instance, “are they in the administrator group?” or “are they in a group with some special privileges?” Today, you’ll learn how to do this with Okta in an ASP.NET...
The Top 10 JavaOne 2017 Sessions for the Java Hipster
A “hipster” is defined as a person who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes. JHipster is an open source project whose name stands for “Java Hipster.” If you’re using JHipster, chances are you’re aware of and using the latest trends and techniques in Java development. Trendy things in server-side Java development include microservices, embedded app servers, deployment with containers, auto-configuration, and monitoring. JHipster supports all of these trends, embracing...
The Okta Developer Console: All New, All You
× Heads up... this blog post is old! This blog post was written in 2017. It is out of date. Okta no longer provides a developer-centric admin console. Instead, all administrators use the same admin console for configuring Okta. Hello Okta Blogosphere! Another Stormpath transplant here! As you know, the Okta developer experience team has been working hard to make it easier for YOU to work hard… on integrating your applications with Okta. We recently...