DeutschJSON Web Tokens: Downsides, Best Practices and Secure and Robust Alternatives
JSON Web Tokens: Downsides, Best Practices and Secure and Robust Alternatives
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) nowadays are commonly used for transmitting authentication data in web applications, especially those exhibiting the widespread client-server architecture where you have a fat client / single-page application written in JavaScript as a front-end and a back-end server providing REST endpoints for use by that front-end client. However, while common there are good arguments against this practice. In a nutshell, JWT often are used for storing session data such user authorization and authentication information although they aren't particularly well-suited to ... Read more
“Accessible HTML Content Patterns” by Eric Bailey
Accessibility, though unfortunately often still treated as an afterthought, is a key part of developing and providing software products, web applications in particular. Accessibility, mark you, isn't just an enabler for those with special needs, although that's sufficient reason for paying attention to your web apps being accessible. Accessibility also is about designing products and processes to be accessible regardless of the device they're used on, the circumstance they're used in and the people they're used by. In that vein, designer Eric Bailey ... Read more
Rarely Used But Useful PostgreSQL Features
I'm an avid user of SQL and the variety of - frequently overlooked - features it provides. However, unfortunately the possibilities of SQL and modern, advanced open source incarnations of RDBMS such as PostgreSQL aren't utilised to the extent they could be when developing web or enterprise applications today. More often than not SQL database are perceived as a mere data store for persisting object-oriented data, which can give rise to the famous object-relational impedance mismatch. SQL servers, PostgreSQL in particular, are capable ... Read more
Imagination, Desire and the Call of the Future – David Delgado @ beyond tellerrand 2019
Imagination, Desire and the Call of the Future - David Delgado from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. Read more
Boring Solutions Revisited: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley
Dan McKinley's article on choosing boring solutions, although not exactly new anymore, has been a welcome reminder for me to revisit the topic of of using boring solutions and keeping things simple. Dan makes the point that "adding technology to your company comes with a cost" or as I stated in my own article on this subject: "The elephant in the room is: There’s an opportunity cost to everything." Most choices come with a trade-off. If you decide to use a technology for the ... Read more
Jess Frazelle: “For the Love of Pipes”
Somewhat recently, Jess Frazelle wrote about her love of UNIX pipes, a sentiment I wholeheartedly share, to the extent that I think web apps should behave more like Unix programs by making data readily available via APIs so other applications can easily process that data. This, in a nutshell, is the Unix philosophy as stated by Doug McIlroy: Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features". Expect the output ... Read more
HTTP and REST Standards, Protocols and Headers for More Secure and More Robust Applications
Standards.REST is a website that helps you create better, more robust HTTP- and REST-based applications by providing an overview of existing, proven standards that allow you to build on existing solutions rather than re-invent the wheel yourself. The list of standards mentioned includes OAuth 2.0, the HTTP Caching standard and Application-Level Profile Semantics (ALPS), which - among others - is used extensively in Spring Data REST and Spring HATEOAS. On a closely related note, Stefan Judis published an article on HTTP headers ... Read more
The Power of Metaphor – Mike Hill @ beyond tellerrand 2019
The Power of Metaphor - Mike Hill from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. Read more
Making Art With Familiar Objects – Red Hong Yi @ beyond tellerrand 2019
Making Art With Familiar Objects - Red Hong Yi from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. Read more
