my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

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.

API-First Development with Spring Boot and Swagger at Reflectoring

When I recently had to look into some of the specifics of using Swagger and OpenAPI for designing an API specification and generating a Spring Boot application skeleton from that specification (using OpenAPI Generator) I came across this very useful and comprehensive article on the subject on the Reflectoring blog: API-First Development with Spring Boot and Swagger From creating an API specification with the Swagger editor to generating code (with the OpenAPI Generator Maven plugin, specifically) and implementing the generated interfaces the article ...

Debugging for Mobile Browsers

Occasionally, web developers need to debug a web app's behaviour in a specific browser on a specific device or class of devices. For desktop devices this usually isn't a problem because every modern browser nowadays provides a console, where application errors and custom console.log statements pile up. However, on mobile browsers there's usually no browser console, or browser development tools, for that matter. Analysing browser logs is still possible via vendors' development tools like Apple's Xcode, for example. Still, that process often ...

Sunday May 3rd, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

My Curated Collection of Angular Design Patterns, Best Practices, and Other Resources

This is my personal, non-exhaustive collection of Angular design patterns, best practices, and otherwise useful Angular resources: General Angular Coding Style Guide Angular Cheat Sheet Top 15 Angular INDEPTH articles of 2019 JSON Schema to TypeScript declarations: Keeping Client and Server Models in Sync with Spring Data REST and Typescript Angular ng-template, ng-container and ngTemplateOutlet - The Complete Guide To Angular Templates The Missing Introduction to Angular and Modern Design Patterns Custom Validators in Angular Testing Dependency Management for Angular Unit Tests Using TestModuleMetadata Using Page Objects with Protractor and Cucumber in ...

Sunday February 16th, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

API Security Best Practices by Expedited Security

For everyone dealing with web-based APIs, both as a provider and a consumer, web app security service supplier Expedited Security (known for Expedited SSL, among other products) has compiled a vast, extensive compendium on API security best practices. The importance of secure APIs and best practices that help has make APIs more secure and dependable can't be emphasised enough. Covering each possible attack vector and adopting every best practice out there can seem like a truly daunting task. Guides like this one help ...

Sunday February 9th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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 ...

Sunday October 27th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

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

Running A Local Angular Development Environment Behind A Spring Cloud Gateway Service

Having multiple microservices running behind a reverse proxy / API gateway in lieu of a single monolithic back-end application is a common pattern these days. With such an architecture it often comes in handy to have an Angular application that serves as a front-end for such a modularised back-end be served from behind a reverse proxy running locally as well in order to treat it is if it were running on the same host and port as the back-end. Not only will ...

Sunday July 21st, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

“Paging with Spring Boot” by Tom Hombergs: A Guide to Paging and Pagination in Spring-based Web Applications

In his article Paging with Spring Boot software engineer Tom Hombergs (a former fellow student) provides an in-depth explanation of paging and pagination concepts and how to implement those in web applications with Spring Data and its Pageable interface. The article covers aspects such as sorting, usage with Spring Data repositories and testing. It's a useful reference for iteratively retrieving and displaying a larger amount of items from a database in a Spring Boot and Spring Data context in an efficient manner. There's ...

Sunday July 7th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

A Guide to Refactoring Large Functions by Robert Muth

Software Engineer Robert Muth wrote this interesting article on refactoring large functions. The article starts with providing ample motivation for using functions (or methods in a strictly object-oriented context). Apart from making code shareable and reusable, which is only a minor benefit of functions / methods, reasons for writing code as functions are: giving a meaningful name to several lines of related code readability limiting visibility lowering indentation levels improving testability The article goes on to describe several common cues indicating that extracting the code at hand to ...

Sunday June 2nd, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software

OAuth 2.0 Authentication with Jira – A Spring Boot Example Application

When dealing with the specifics of authentication techniques and protocols such as OAuth the devil often is in the detail. While the OAuth 2.0 protocol generally is easy to grasp and simple to use implementation details for specific authentication providers can easily have you hit a snag fairly quickly. Documentation and examples sometimes are outdated or scattered across several - sometimes contradictory documents. Additionally, examples for the authentication provider you want to use might not have been written with your framework of ...

Sunday March 31st, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.