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.

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 ...

Monoliths Aren’t Inherently Bad

Self-professed minimalist developer Kelsey Hightower a few months ago wrote about monoliths being the future. The microservice design pattern has been trending in software development for quite some now. Unfortunately, more often than not it's been indiscriminately treated as a panacea to every software architecture and design problem out there. Microservices can help with one aspect specifically: Reducing deployment risk. If you have a large monolith and frequently need to make changes to a specific part or feature provided by that monolith the whole ...

Sunday March 22nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

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

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 ...

Sunday November 10th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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

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

“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

Observatory by Mozilla: Security Checkup for Your Websites and Web Apps

Observatory by Mozilla is a security checkup tool for websites and web apps that both assesses your website in terms of HTTP security measures and best practices and also suggests approaches and techniques for further improving security. Observatory's goal is to provide developers with insights as to their applications' security standards as well as to educate developers about HTTP security options such as the Content Security Policy or HTTP Strict Transport Security headers and the respective standards and policies they implement. Observatory is ...

Sunday February 10th, 2019 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Dinero.js: Working With Monetary Values in JavaScript

Working with monetary values can become a problem in any programming language and JavaScript certainly is no different in that respect. The naïve assumption that monetary values can be expressed as floating point numbers almost inevitably leads to rounding errors caused by precision and the fact that in most cases monetary values are represented as decimal numbers with just two (instead of an undefined number of) decimal places. Apart from that, money is not just a number but usually comprises a currency ...

Sunday November 25th, 2018 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Jenny Shen: UX Design Across Different Cultures

UX designer Jenny Shen recently has been featured on the Scott Hanselman's podcast with her work on UX design across different cultures. She's published a two-part summary of her experiences with cross-cultural design and internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of websites and applications: UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 1 UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 2 These articles shed light on how distributing an application or publishing a website in another country not only requires translating the content and labels of UI elements but also has ...

Sunday November 18th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.