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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

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 ...
Sunday October 6th, 2019 by Bjoern in Software
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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 ...
Sunday September 29th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications
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HTML is an API

HTML is an API or rather it could be if we used more in the way it was intended. In a comment on this Hacker News post about Toapi, a library that makes clever use of XPath expressions in order to provide an API from existing web pages, a user wrote Now I don't want to be a downer: but we collectively seem to have forgotten that HTML as a markup language with sufficient semantic elements, is a perfect API in itself. ...
Sunday May 20th, 2018 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications
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More on JSON and REST API Specifications

Expanding on my previous posts about annotating and validating JSON data structure with JSON Schema defining and documenting REST APIs using Swagger I have two additional suggestions for tools that help you define and build HTTP-based APIs in a less haphazard, more deliberate manner: JSON API: While JSON Schema allows you to annotate and validate JSON-based data types JSON API gives you clear, opinionated guidelines for structuring JSON API responses so you don't have think about those implementation details yourself. Having uniform guidelines for API ...
Sunday October 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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Swagger: A Roundtrip Tool For Creating And Consuming REST APIs

In this second part of my series on useful tools for developing CRUD applications I'd like to introduce Swagger and Swagger Codegen in particular. Introduce perhaps isn't exactly the right word because first of all Swagger is quite well known in developer circles these days. Secondly, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Swagger to generate client SDKs for REST APIs. Swagger - originally having originated at Wordnik is a tool for documenting and publishing their ...
Sunday September 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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Using Netflix Zuul As a Reverse Proxy / API Gateway

Zuul, which like the service discovery tool Eureka and the fault tolerance library Hystrix is part of Netflix' cloud orchestration stack, is a reverse proxy / API gateway. A reverse proxy conceptually works like this: A reverse proxy allows you to route requests to a single domain to multiple backing services behind that proxy. This can be conducive in situations where you want to break up your application into several loosely-coupled components that externally, that is facing the user, nonetheless act as if ...
Sunday August 20th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software
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Using Swagger to Generate Client SDKs for REST APIs

These days Swagger is a popular, easy-to-use tool for (semi-)automatically documenting REST APIs on-the-fly. For example, in order to document a REST API created with Spring Boot and Jersey literally all you have to do is add these two entries to your Maven pom.xml: [xml] <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger2</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger-ui</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> [/xml] You'll then get a ready-made documentation for all your REST API endpoints. An example of how this looks like can be seen here. While this already is very useful in that it helps with properly documenting your software, especially ...
Sunday May 21st, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software
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Testing REST Services with REST Assured

RESTful service testing can be unwieldy and difficult to get started with. Providing a REST API implies using a variety of technologies and techniques such as HTTP, JSON, authentication, various payload transfer mechanisms and content types. This is where a tool that abstracts over these technical details and facilitates their application comes in handy. REST Assured is a high-level DSL for testing REST APIs. It draws upon behaviour-driven development (BDD) and hence makes for readable test descriptions. A typical acceptance test with ...
Sunday April 30th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software
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Follow-up on “Accounting in 2016”

Two months ago, I wrote an article on how accounting in 2016 still is a manual and tedious process. What made me write this article in the first place was the problem that I couldn't automatically get the bank account statements for my business account into my accounting software because my bank's online banking service and my accounting software have incompatible import / export file formats and neither exposes a public API for facilitating communication between and automation of accounting software ...
Sunday June 5th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software
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