Ever since the concept of big data got introduced to the programming world, a lot of different technologies, frameworks have emerged. The processing of data can be categorized into two different paradigms. One is Batch Processing, and the other is Stream Processing.
\nDifferent technologies came into existence for different paradigms, solving various big data world problems, for, e.g., Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Apache Storm, etc.
\nAs a developer or a business, it's always challenging to maintain different tech stacks and technologies. Hence, Apache Beam to the rescue!
\nLet's take a sample input. Name the file as The input should be a newline delimited JSON. Include the following dependencies in your Let's code the beam pipeline. Follow the steps Create a pipeline. Create a pipeline which binds all the pcollections and transforms. Optionally you can pass the PipelineOptions Read the input file Use the Apply a transform to filter out the names starting from a vowel The filter transform takes a SerializableFunction Object where the Write the results to a file The results of the Output: Complete Code: For more advanced concepts, refer to the official site - beam.apache.org GraphQL's popularity has skyrocketed since its release in 2015. It is the modern way of developing and querying APIs. GraphQL is an application programming interface (API) query language and server-side runtime that prioritises giving customers precisely the data they request. GraphQL is designed to make fast, scalable, and developer-friendly APIs. GraphQL allows developers to build requests that pull data from multiple data sources in a single API call as an alternative to REST. It was developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015. \"On 7 November 2018, the GraphQL project was moved from Facebook to the newly-established GraphQL Foundation, hosted by the non-profit Linux Foundation.\" GraphQL is an application-level query language that helps data fetching and serving between client and server runtime by providing a standard protocol for queries. Its strength lies in the fact that it offers a modern, simpler, and efficient way to query and develop APIs. The real deal is its flexible data fetching -- the application only loads relevant data from the server. Also, GraphQL is hierarchical in nature; it structures relationships in a simple hierarchical manner to avoid complex queries while fetching data. GraphQL offers much power and flexibility over Traditional APIs. One of the few things GraphQL was designed, was to solve Data Fetching/Loading problems. Data fetching is one of the most critical factors responsible for the performance of the application. Most of the time, the data provided by the API isn't required to run the application. This problem is termed as \"Over fetching\", which can be a more significant issue in mobile devices. Since devices with slower network connection are bound to take more load time, it creates a negative impact on end-users. In the current scenario, traditional REST APIs offer no clean way to solve this problem; GraphQL comes to the rescue. It allows clients to define the structure of the data required, and the same structure of the data is returned from the server. Therefore preventing fetching loads and loads of data, ultimately increasing performance. API endpoints generally fetch specific data, hence to load a certain data-rich application, there have to be multiple requests to the server. But, applications should fetch relevant data in one round trip to avoid degrading performance. The flexibility and richness of the GraphQL, allows us to define all the data to fetch in a single request, avoiding multiple Round trips Schema - GraphQL follows a type system to define the schema of an API. The syntax for writing schemas is called Schema Definition Language (SDL). Query - The data or information that a client needs from a server can be fetched in a request using queries. Mutation - Mutations are the way to modify data to the server; these include creating/updating/deleting data. They have similar syntax as queries, with special keywords ahead of them. Despite its powers, you might not need graphQL in your applications - GraphQL is a step forward in the world of applications by providing a significant boost in performance. Another plus point of GraphQL is that it is not meant to replace any existing solution but enhance and co-exist with REST APIs. Simply put, the future of GraphQL looks bright. OAuth has been a jargon for quite some time now and it is difficult for a beginner to learn it, not because OAuth is hard, but because of the confusing facts found about OAuth on the web. So I wrote this article to explain why and how OAuth is used in very simple terms. Let’s start with the basics: OAuth stands for Open Authorization. It’s a process through which an application or website can access private data from another website.\nIt provides applications the ability for “secure designated access.” For example, you can tell Google that it’s OK for abc.com to access your google account or contact without having to give abc.com your google password. OAuth never share password data but instead uses authorization tokens to prove an identity between consumers and service providers. OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows you to approve one application interacting with another on your behalf without giving away your password. We have a pretty good understanding of OAuth 2.0 and Terminology, let’s move further and discuss the OAuth grant type that is widely used in this protocol. In total, there are five different grant type flows defined and described to perform authorizations tasks. Those are The Authorization Code Grant Type is the most commonly used grant type. The Story: A user tries to log in on abc.com but he can’t remember his password and he discovers an option to sign in with google, by clicking on this, the user will easily get logged using google account. Flow The client redirects the user to the authorization server having the following parameters in the query string. Step 1 After successful authentication, the user will be redirected to the Consent screen where he needs to provide consent to abc.com to access the account detail.\nAuthorization code is generated by the authorization server and sent back to the client with redirect Uri. Step 2\nThe client will now send a POST request to the authorization server with the following parameters: In the entire flow, the access token is never exposed to a web browser. The Implicit flow was a simplified OAuth flow previously recommended for client-side applications like JavaScript apps where the access token was returned immediately without an extra authorization code exchange step. The Story: In this flow abc.com directly get access token without an extra authorization code exchange steps and able to access resources on a resource server Flow The client will redirect the user to the authorization server with the following parameters in the query string: It is not recommended to use the implicit flow (and some servers prohibit this flow entirely) due to the inherent risks of returning access tokens in an HTTP redirect without any confirmation that it has been received by the client. The resource owner password credentials grant type is suitable in cases where the resource owner has a trust relationship with the client, such as a highly privileged application. The authorization server should take special care when enabling this grant type and only allow it when other flows are not viable. This grant type is suitable for clients capable of obtaining the resource owner’s credentials (username and password, typically using an interactive form). It is also used to migrate existing clients using direct authentication schemes such as HTTP Basic or Digest authentication to OAuth by converting the stored credentials to an access token. Flow The client will ask the user for their authorization credentials (usually a username and password).\nThe client then sends a POST request with following body parameters to the authorization server: Using this flow the client can request an access token using only its client credentials (or other supported means of authentication). The Story: The client application presents its client credentials (client identifier and client secret) to the authorization server requesting approval to access the protected resource (owned by the client application) on the resource server.\nThe authorization server authenticates the client credential and issues an access token. Flow The client sends a POST request with following body parameters to the authorization server: Access tokens eventually expire, however, some grants respond with a refresh token which enables the client to refresh the access token. Flow The client sends a POST request with following body parameters to the authorization server: I hope you got an idea of how OAuth works and why it is needed. Now it’s time for you to go explore, find out more about the OAuth flow and implement it into your application.\nGood Luck and have fun! Thank you for following this article and hope it helped you! Please do buzz me if you want any help: indrasen.kumar@loginradius.com This blog is a short guide on implementing AWS Lambda and SQS together. First we’ll introduce these technologies and explain why they work well together, then walkthrough some configurations and invocation using a simple Nodejs script. What are they?\nAWS Lambda is a popular choice in serverless computing. As an event-driven platform, AWS Lambda requires users to configure event sources in order to run a function. Their built-in support for many AWS services like S3 and SQS as event sources allow for relatively simple configuration. Note that Lambda functions can also be triggered via HTTP(S) by using AWS API Gateway service. AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a queue service with 2 types: standard and FIFO. The major difference is that standard queues guarantee “at-least once” delivery of its messages, while FIFO queues guarantee “exactly-once” delivery. FIFO queues, however, provide lower maximum throughput than standard. As previously mentioned, AWS SQS can be an event source for AWS Lambda. This means that when a message is added to the queue, the configured Lambda function will be invoked with an event containing this message. But why use them together? One limitation for many use cases was the “at-least once” delivery model of events with standard queues. Essentially, there was no guarantee that an event will only be delivered once to a consuming Lambda function. In cases where each event can strictly only be processed once, one would have to employ various strategies resulting in higher overhead and complexity. But, this is no longer an issue because recently the AWS team added support for FIFO queues as event sources to Lambda functions. Walkthrough 1. Starting with SQS, add a standard queue. 2. Now, add a Lambda function: 3. Create a new execution role with the following configs: 5. Add a trigger: 6. Programmatically enqueue a message into SQS with the following code in Nodejs: a. Create package.json with `npm init` We're delightfully Announcing SDK Version 10.0.0. This full-version release includes major changes with several improvements and optimizations, the details have been given below. For complete information please visit LoginRadius API documents. We have added new APIs in this release, that will complement the existing ones. To cope up with the changes around the social platforms, we have removed some existing APIs as they are no longer supported by the social providers. Below are the details of those APIs. This blog is part 1 of a series on gRPC. Part 1 will go over some important concepts, part 2 will be a walkthrough of a client-server implementation in Go, and part 3 will be about LoginRadius' experience migrating to gRPC! gRPC gRPC, simply put, is just another way to send data across networks. It can be used to communicate between services in a microservice architecture, where a single service can interact with multiple others. Similarly, in client-server models, there can be multiple clients communicating with a common backend server. The gRPC framework was initially developed at Google and is now open-source. It is a modern implementation of the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) protocol, which has been around since the 80s. You will often see gRPC being compared to other technologies like SOAP, REST, and GraphQL. Some features: How is it used to send data? gRPC is based on the idea of calling a remote procedure just like a local one. A procedure is like a function or a method. So, ideally developers can treat remote and local calls similarly. A great thing about gRPC is that developers do not need to know the details of the remote interaction. Here is a diagram from the official grpc docs showing the flow: Why gRPC? One compelling reason to use gRPC is that it provides high performance How does it differ from REST? Other Considerations Here, we briefly go over a few other things to consider with gRPC. These will be covered in more detail in another blog. Management of proto files Using proto2 vs. proto3 Load-Balancing That's it for now! To learn more, check out the official gRPC and protobuf docs. It is hard to write 100% holes-free code, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes it is not even your own fault (language implementation, server setups, etc.) and those factors are likely out of your control. That being said, as developers, we should strive to write our code as safe and secure as possible. Here are my suggestions to keep yourself from being woken up in the middle of the night: 1. DO NOT trust any user-input, PERIOD. Not even if it is yours truly. This is the most common attack vector for your web applications, whether it is just a contact form or an API end-point. For example, if a form is implemented to store data in a database, someone can try brute-forcing with classic SQL-injection techniques. Others can certainly try calling your API and see if there are any spotty error-handling issues. Sanitize all inputs as much as you can, and handle all errors behind the scenes properly and gracefully without exposing the actual details to the public. 2. UPDATE, UPGRADE and REPEAT. Chances are, a lot of your code is dependent on third-party libraries (open or closed source, does not matter). It is your job to make sure you are using the latest version for them all. When hackers find out you are using outdated or vulnerable code, you are done. I have seen this happening way too many times than I can count over the years when websites got hacked and outdated plugins or libraries was the main culprit. You might be saying, \"Hey, upgrading that library will break my code!!\". Well, what is your job again? Deal with it. 3. Web Application Firewall (WAF) Consider getting one if your server admin lets you, it can potentially save yourself a lot of embarrassments. Just keep in mind though it should not be your only security strategy, as WAFs will not stop all kinds of attacks. It is still your sole responsibility to write good code and repeat step 1 and 2. Happyyyyy coding! Do you remember the Amazon outage that affected several high-profile customers back in 2011? On April 21st, widely-used sites such as Reddit and Quora were brought down, and many others experienced latency or were knocked offline, too. Early that morning, as part of normal scaling activities, Amazon staff performed a network change. However, the change was done incorrectly and, after the staff attempted to correct it through a rollback, the inner mechanisms of the service made it unavailable to serve read and write requests. The ‘inner mechanisms’ responsible for the service unavailability are out of the scope of this article, but they are described in the service disruption summary that Amazon published. What interests us here is the strategies that companies can use to mitigate the negative effects on their products when a service they rely on fails. These strategies make up what is known as a failover system. A failover system is a set of mechanisms that perform failover. In computer networking, failover is the process of switching to a redundant or standby server or network upon the abnormal termination of a previously-active server or network. The benefit of a failover system is obvious: with one in place, you can ensure your product or service will be available even when adverse events take place. Uptime—time during which a service is operational—is crucial to the success of your business. If your services are unavailable, you are likely to lose customers and any revenue they would have generated. In an article entitled ‘Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Outage,’ Netflix talks about the manual process they used to deal with the Amazon outage and acknowledges the importance of automating this process in the future so they can keep scaling their service. That is, the company acknowledges the importance of having an automated failover system in place instead of relying on a team of top engineers manually making changes every time there is an issue. How is an automated failover system set up? Let us consider the simplest scenario: setting a failover system for one server. By definition of a failover system, in addition to the main server, we need to have another redundant standby server that we can switch to whenever the main one fails. Since the redundant server must provide the same functionality as the first, it must be identical to it. Additionally, we need a tool that ensures client requests are routed to the redundant server in case of failure of the main one. We can achieve this by using a DNS failover tool. DNS is the internet protocol used to translate human-readable hostnames into IP addresses, and a DNS failover tool makes sure the “dictionary” (DNS tables) used for this translation are updated in the event of an outage. DNS failover tools know when to update the tables by periodically checking on the main server’s status. With these three tools—and some configuration—you can set up a simple, automated failover system. Of course, there are other considerations you must take when setting the failover system, such as ensuring the redundant standby server is hosted in a geographic area different from the main server’s location and using different companies to host your services. That way, your services will be less likely to go down simultaneously. At LoginRadius, we have set up automated failover systems in all layers of our architecture, which is why we can ensure 99.99% uptime on a monthly basis. With our services, you can be assured your customers will always be able to engage with your business, ensuring you will never lose these customers and any revenue they will generate. Bots are tools that are created to automate tedious processes and reduce work. For example, chatbots automate replies to users for customer support, and search bots are used to populate search results on a Google search. However, there are many bots that are crafted for the malicious self-interest of a party. Examples of these hostile bots include DDOS (Direct Denial of Service) botnets and spam bots. This post will provide some information on how to implement bot protection to protect your systems from these nasty bot attacks. One of the most popular methods of bot protection that is used today is CAPTCHA, which is provided through companies such as ReCAPTCHA, NuCaptcha and Solve Media. CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, is an anti-bot measure which consists of a challenge which a user must complete to verify if the user is human. Examples of challenges include translating images of distorted text, or recognition of objects in an image which match a given word. CAPTCHAs are useful in blocking automated form submissions by bots and are constantly being updated to be more friendly to human users. Some of the latest CAPTCHA implementations only require the user to click on a checkbox to pass their validation check. An example of a ReCAPTCHA with distorted text To implement CAPTCHA using Google’s ReCAPTCHA solution, you can access Google reCAPTCHA bot protection and login with your Google account. Following that you will be redirected to an interface where you can register your site. Different types of CAPTCHAs can be set up for different events on your domain and can be built to match your use case. An example of a ReCAPTCHA with a checkbox validation CAPTCHAs have a variety of uses, and can be used to prevent automated form completions and even prevent access to your domain. Setting up a CAPTCHA detection solution for different scenarios will typically provide a strong bot defense for your system. Spam honeypots are traps that ensnare bots by placing hidden input fields within a form that reject registration upon being filled in. Bots that use detect form fields through HTML may be programmed to fill in all the input fields in a form including the honeypot. Meanwhile, since the fields are hidden, human users should not be able to see the honeypot and should not be filling in the field. The implementation of a honey pot can be as simple as implementing an extra form field onto your page that should not be filled in. Hide the element using CSS and set up logic to prevent users that fill in the field from successfully completing the form. A simple implementation can be done with this code: With the implementation of the above code, if a bot is setup to fill in all input fields on your web page, then the hidden honeypot input will be filled in and the bot will be detected. On the other hand, if a normal user attempts to complete the form on the page, the honeypot would be invisible and the registration will be successful. Honeypots are a solution to weed out basic bots, but they can be easily circumvented depending on how the honeypot is implemented. Regardless, adding a honeypot still provides an additional layer of defense against bot inputs and will help deter some bot traffic on your site. Often times, when bots are created to automate a task, they would be programmed to complete these tasks as quickly as possible to maximize efficiency. As a countermeasure, time lockouts can be set up to prevent bots from repeatedly spamming requests. By setting up a time lockout between requests to your domain, bots which attempt to quickly submit data on your domain will be detected. Meanwhile, human users that are registering onto the site will be working at a slower pace and will not notice the time lockout at all. Setting a timer on form completion does not prevent any bots from affecting your domain, but can significantly slow down their efficiency. Combined with ReCAPTCHA or other anti-bot measures, it can be very useful in reducing the impact of bots. If an entity accessing your website is from an unexpected location, for example, a Russian IP accessing your domain for an American service, using IP blacklists may be useful to prevent possible bot attacks. IP blacklisting can usually be set up through your hosting services and allows you to customize where users may access your domain. There are some issues with blacklisting, though. Choosing which targets to blacklist could be a tedious task. Even with a bot set up to detect users with suspicious activity and block them, there could be a chance of a false positive, which may result in users of your domain being blacklisted. If you want to save your site from spams and denial-of-service attacks you can incorporate a layer of Proof Of Work algorithm in your site. Whenever any client will try to connect to your server they need to commit some of their resources to the Proof Of Work algorithm first and then the server should be connected. With this approach, any legitimate user would experience just a negligible computational cost, but a spammer/attacker trying to establish a large number of connections would bear the computational cost and time delay, it deters the abuser to do so. There are many POW algorithms which you can use eg:- Client Puzzle Protocol, Productive Puzzle Protocol, Guided Tour Puzzle Protocol Other malicious bots that can impact user experience negatively include, but are not limited to, bots designed for DDOS attacks, spam bots that harvest user data, bots that create links to phishing websites which generate viruses, and malicious bot worms that infect computers. Countermeasures for these bots vary depending on what is being prevented. Honeypot data fields can act as a detection method against bots harvesting data, and with proper preventative training, phishing and scam bots can be handled. Third party services may also be used to protect from different forms of bots. For example, to mitigate impacts of DDOS attacks, a user may implement a solution offered by CloudFlare. Another example is the use of an ad blocker to prevent malware from being drive-by downloaded by intrusive ads. Unless your domain is a highly popular website, or is being targeted by technical security violation experts, there is a good chance that utilizing a simple Google ReCaptcha prompt for form completion is enough to handle any malicious bots that attempt to access your website. For domains with significantly more traffic, paid solutions like Cloudflare might also be useful in dealing with malicious bots. Keep in mind that although some bots are created for bad purposes, a large number of bots exist to automate beneficial tasks and make it easier for humans. Even though there are a significant amount of bots that are not helpful, it is important to embrace how useful benevolent bots actually are. OAuth2 is an authorization delegation protocol that allows one party’s accessing of an end user’s resources stored with another party without sharing any credentials. OAuth2 is often compared with SAML and OpenID Connect as their purposes and uses overlap, however these comparisons often refer to OAuth2 as OAuth. This has resulted in some confusion regarding OAuth2 and OAuth1. OAuth1 was published in 2010, and OAuth2 is a complete rewrite of OAuth1 released in 2012. The following section will go over the most significant needs that led to this rewrite, along with the change associated to address them. One of the commonly agreed-upon disadvantages of OAuth1 was the lack of support it offers to non-browser based application clients. OAuth2 has different authorization work flows to address authorization initiated by native application clients. This was one of the main advantages OAuth2 has over OAuth1. However, abuse of the flows in favour of convenience and ease can lead to insecure implementations of OAuth2. When using OAuth2 for mobile, desktop, or single page applications, it is recommended to refer to the IETF paper going over best OAuth2 practices for mobile apps: IETF. OAuth1 was often criticized for the barrier it poses to writing a client as each exchange between client, server, and resource server requires a validation of a shared secret. This secret is used to sign the arguments for the authorization request by the client, subsequently the server signs the arguments with the client’s key to verify the legitimacy of the client. The arguments need to be passed in the exact order and is often finicky to write. Moreover, dealing with cryptographic signing of the requests in addition to this can be a pain. OAuth2 has delegated this part of the security to transfer over HTTPS. This means while OAuth1 is protocol-independent, OAuth2 requests must be sent over SSL. Since TLS already provides transport-level message privacy and integrity, some question the merit of arguably redundant client-side signing and argument sorting. Others have brought up concerns with completely delegating security to HTTPS, and mention reasons such as yet-undiscovered zero-day TLS vulnerabilities potentially compromising entire systems. The conceptualization of OAuth2 defines a resource server in addition to an authorization server. This means there is a clear separation of roles between the server that handles the authorization request, and the server that makes access-control decisions based on the response to the authorization request. This separation of concerns allows support for more flexible use cases. All of the above points seem to suggest OAuth2 as a superior alternative to OAuth1, and that OAuth1 is obsolete. This is not the case. It is very rare to see a greenfield authorization system using OAuth1, and the only major player still using OAuth1 is Twitter -- they call their version OAuth1.0a. However, as far as security and usability is concerned, OAuth1 is still viable and perhaps even more secure than OAuth2 since it offers additional security on top of TLS-based precautions, and creates barriers in potentially compromising flows. An existing system that uses OAuth1 probably does not need to upgrade to OAuth2. New systems that rely on server-to-server authorization could probably leverage OAuth1 for the additional security as well. On the other hand, use cases that could benefit from a separation of concerns, non-browser support, and ease of client development should go for OAuth2. OAuth2 has received its own share of criticisms. For example, in 2012 Eran Hammer, one of the original authors of OAuth2, withdrew his name from the specification and wrote an article calling out its many flaws. However, even in this article he agreed with the usefulness of OAuth2, and that “at the hand of a developer with deep understanding of web security will likely result in a secure implementation”. OAuth2 is not necessarily more secure than OAuth1, and using OAuth2 does not inherently lead to better security. Many considerations must go into each specific implementation. For starters, the appropriate grant flow must be chosen with care pertaining to the use case; the redirect_uri must be validated sufficiently; and measures must be taken to prevent access tokens from ending up in the browser history. For additional security considerations, see this IETF work in progress draft on OAuth Security Best Current Practice. This blog post goes over how you can connect your SAAS/web application with the Azure AD world. Let’s take a look at how Azure AD works as an identity provider to provide your users with the ability to log in. e.g if anyone using Office 365, able to log on with their standard account or a federated one. Windows Azure provides a number of identity-based technologies to support such kind of requirements. As a means of illustrating this, we’ll show an example using Azure AD as an Identity Provider (IdP), connecting up to the LoginRadius SAAS application using the LoginRadius Admin Console. Here are the meanings of the terms, we have used above: Sign-On Url: This is where you want to send users to when accessing the \"application\". Reply URL: It's the Reply URL which is the address to which Azure AD will send the SAML authentication response. On the Service Provider side, the metadata from the tenant, Azure Identity Provider needs to be parsed and added to the configuration file. This is done by downloading the Azure IdP metadata file directly, e.g. This is all you need to know to go about creating a new application on the Azure portal and use Azure Ad as an Identity provider for login. With these and a number of services, Azure offers a solid convergence point for brokering connections with your web applications and workspaces. Time Required : less than 10 minutes. Technologies : None. Prerequisites : None. This tutorial will go over how to configure the ‘Actions on Google’ console so that it can be used for your Google Assistant actions/events that can be accessed anywhere the Google Assistant is available from phones to Google Home products. Create an Actions project and a Dialogflow agent here.input.json
\n{"name":"abhi", "score":12}\n{"name":"virat", "score":23}\n{"name":"dhoni", "score":45}\n{"name":"rahul", "score": 156}\n{"name": "Edmund"}\n{"name": "Ojha"}pom.xml
\n<dependency>\n <groupId>org.apache.beam</groupId>\n <artifactId>beam-sdks-java-core</artifactId>\n <version>2.24.0</version>\n</dependency>\n\n<dependency>\n <groupId>org.apache.beam</groupId>\n <artifactId>beam-runners-direct-java</artifactId>\n <version>2.24.0</version>\n</dependency>\n
\n
\nPipeline pipeLine = Pipeline.create();\n// OR \n// Pipeline pipeLine = Pipeline.create(options);options if needed.
\nPCollection<String> inputCollection = pipeLine.apply("Read My File", TextIO.read().from("input.json"));TextIO transform to read the input files. Every line is a different json record.
\nPCollection filteredCollection = inputCollection.apply("Filter names starting with vowels", Filter.by(new SerializableFunction<String, Boolean>() {\n\n public Boolean apply(String input) {\n ObjectMapper jacksonObjMapper = new ObjectMapper();\n try {\n JsonNode jsonNode = jacksonObjMapper.readTree(input);\n String name = jsonNode.get("name").textValue();\n return vowels.contains(name.substring(0,1).toLowerCase());\n } catch (JsonProcessingException e) {\n e.printStackTrace();\n }\n return false;\n }\n }))apply method is overridden. Every json-string record is converted to a JSON. The first character of the name is checked if it's a vowel. The transform is applied to each input JSON record. Based on the boolean value returned, the record is retained or discarded.
\ninputCollection.apply("write to file", TextIO.write().to("result").withSuffix(".txt").withoutSharding());Filter transform are stored in a text file using the write method of the TextIO transform. As PCollections are distributed across machines, the results are written to multiple files/shards. To avoid this, we use withoutSharding where all the output is written to a single file.
\n{"name": "Edmund"}\n{"name": "Ojha"}\n{"name":"abhi", "score":12}
\n
\nPipeline pipeLine = Pipeline.create();\n\nfinal Set<String> vowels = new HashSet<String>(Arrays.asList("a","e","i","o","u"));\n\npipeLine.apply("Read My File",\n TextIO.read().from("input.json"))\n .apply("Filter names starting with vowels", Filter.by(new SerializableFunction<String, Boolean>() {\n\n public Boolean apply(String input) {\n ObjectMapper jacksonObjMapper = new ObjectMapper();\n try {\n JsonNode jsonNode = jacksonObjMapper.readTree(input);\n String name = jsonNode.get("name").textValue();\n return vowels.contains(name.substring(0,1).toLowerCase());\n } catch (JsonProcessingException e) {\n e.printStackTrace();\n }\n return false;\n }\n }))\n .apply("write to file", TextIO.write().to("result").withSuffix(".txt").withoutSharding());\n\npipeLine.run().waitUntilFinish();Foundation of GraphQL
\nWhat is GraphQL?
\nWhy to use GraphQL?
\nFundamentals of GraphQL
\n\n\n
\n\n \n\n\n\nServer -> \nGraphQL Server -> \nGraphql Client -> \nClient \n
\n
\n# A simple example to define schema\ntype Person {\n name: String!\n age: Int!\n}
\n# This query fetches all specifically names of all users\n{\n users {\n name\n }\n}\n# This query fetches all names of all friends of user "Anup".\n{\n user(name: "Anup") {\n name\n friend {\n name\n }\n }\n}
\n# This mutation adds a user with name "Anup" and age 20.\nmutation {\n addUser( name : "Anup", age: 20) {\n name\n age\n }\n}\n
\nConclusion
\nGetting Started with OAuth 2.0
\nNow Let’s have a look at OAuth 2.0 Terminology.
\n\n
\n\n
\nAuthorization Code Grant
\n\n
\n\n
\nImplicit Grant
\n\n
\nResource Owner Credentials Grant
\n\n
\nClient Credentials Grant
\n\n
\nRefresh Token Grant
\n\n
\nConclusion
\n
\nCommon reasons include better handling Lambda function invocations and errors. For function invocations, the default concurrency limit is 1000. If a function has reached this limit, any additional invocations will fail with a throttling error. However, with SQS as an event source, events resulting in throttling errors are automatically retried based on set configs. This prevents the loss of events due to unexpected jumps in usage. Additionally, dead-letter queues (DLQ) can be configured as a place where failed events go, to avoid retrying indefinitely. Failed events in DLQ can then be sent somewhere like a DB for analysis.
\nLet’s set up a basic “Hello World” application with SQS and Lambda.
\na. Trusted Entity: Lambda
\nb. Permissions: AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole; AWSLambdaSQSQueueExecutionRole
\na. Batch size set to 1, so the Lambda Function will process 1 message at a time.
\nconst AWS = require("aws-sdk");\nAWS.config.update({\n region: <AWS_SQS_REGION>, // TODO\n accessKeyId: <AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID>, // TODO\n secretAccessKey: <AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY> // TODO\n});\n\nconst sqs = new AWS.SQS({ apiVersion: "2012-11-05" });\nsqs.sendMessage({\n MessageBody: JSON.stringify({hello: "world"}),\n QueueUrl: <AWS_SQS_URL> // TODO\n}, (err, data) => (err) ? console.log("Error", err) : console.log("Success", data.MessageId));
\nb. Install aws sdk dependency with `npm i aws-sdk --save`
\nc. Fill in your specific AWS account details. Find AWS_SQS_URL by selecting the queue you created, while AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY require creating a new IAM user with programmatic access. This user also needs permission to push messages into SQS.
\nd. Run script with `node app.js`
\ne. Navigate to Monitoring tab in your Lambda function, the invocations graph should have a new data point (may take a few minutes to update).New Features Added:
\n\n
\nImprovements and optimizations:
\n\n
\nNew APIs:
\n\n
\nRemoved APIs:
\n\n
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"October 31, 2019","updated_date":null,"title":"SDK Version 10.0.0","tags":["Engineering","SDK","Version"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1.3333333333333333,"src":"/static/88ba5be9965365e5417420f1910d9c33/497c6/SDK.png","srcSet":"/static/88ba5be9965365e5417420f1910d9c33/69585/SDK.png 200w,\n/static/88ba5be9965365e5417420f1910d9c33/497c6/SDK.png 400w","sizes":"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px"}}},"author":{"id":"Indrasen Kumar","github":"indrasen715","avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/getting-started-with-grpc-part-1-concepts/"},"html":"\n
\n\n
\n\n\n
\n\n \n\n\n\n gRPC \nREST \n\n \nAPI \nContract-based i.e. stubs \nResource-based and relies on HTTP verbs i.e. GET/PUT/POST/DELETE \n\n \nNetwork protocol \nHTTP/2 \nHTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 \n\n \nData serialization format \nProtocol buffers \nJSON \n\n \n\nStreaming \nBuilt-in support for client, server, and bi-directional streaming \nREST on HTTP/1.1 does not allow streaming \n
\nIf you plan to have multiple proto files and client services, you need some way to manage them for distribution and version control. One solution is to keep all proto files in a central git repository, and maintain versions using git tags.
\nProtocol buffers have two syntax versions: proto2 and proto3.\n
\n
\nSomething to note about load-balancing gRPC is that HTTP/2 requires L7 (Application Layer) load-balancers. Recall that in HTTP/2, TCP connections are long-lived and requests are multiplexed. This makes L4 (Connection Layer) load-balancers ineffective. This differs from HTTP/1.1 where TCP connections get cycled and can benefit from L4 load-balancers. CAPTCHA:
\n![](\"https://media-s3-us-east-1.ceros.com/editorial-content/images/2018/05/31/c5c224dc0fb2a058625073c470d70c3c/recaptcha-big.png?ver=1552286291?imageOpt=1&fit=bounds&width=1077\")
![](\"https://media.giphy.com/media/10p3VEnw29dD44/giphy.gif?ver=1552286291?ver=1552286291\")
Spam Honeypots:
\n
\n<input id="first-name-input" type="text" name="firstname" value="Fill me in"> <input style="display: none;" id="honeypot-input" type="text" name="honeypot"> <button type="button" onclick="submitForm()" value="button">Submit</button> <button type="button" onclick="fill()" value="button">Fill Honeypot</button> <script> let submitForm = function() { let honeypot = document.getElementById("honeypot-input").value; if(!honeypot) { \n // Handle input submit \n console.log(“Pass”); } \n else { \n // Handle honeypot error \n console.log(“Fail”); } } \n let fill = function() { document.getElementById("honeypot-input").value = "Example"; } \n</script>Lockout Time:
\nBlacklisting IPs:
\nProof Of Work:
\nOther Forms of Malicious Bots:
\nConclusion:
\nSupport for non-browser based applications
\nEase of implementation
\nClear separation of roles
\nSo, OAuth1 or OAuth2?
\n\n
\n\n
\nhttps://login.microsoftonline.com/<AzureTenantID>/federationmetadata/2007-06/federationmetadata.xmlSteps
\n\n
\n
\n
What is an End of Line character:
\nIt is a character in a string which represents a line break, which means that after this character, a new line will start. There are two basic new line characters:
\nLF (character : \\n, Unicode : U+000A, ASCII : 10, hex : 0x0a): This is simply the '\\n' character which we all know from our early programming days. This character is commonly known as the ‘Line Feed’ or ‘Newline Character’.
\nCR (character : \\r, Unicode : U+000D, ASCII : 13, hex : 0x0d) : This is simply the 'r' character. This character is commonly known as ‘Carriage Return’.
\nAs matter of fact, \\r has also has a different meaning. In older printers, \\r meant moving the print head back to the start of line and \\n meant starting a new line.
\nOS support
\nUnix: Unix systems consider '\\n' as a line terminator. Unix considers \\r as going back to the start of the same line.
\nMac (up to 9): Older Mac OSs consider '\\r' as a newline terminator but newer OS versions have been made to be more compliant with Unix systems to use '\\n' as the newline.
\nWindows: Windows has a different style of newline, Windows supports the combination of both CR and LF as the newline character - '\\r\\n'.
\nHow to check
\nThere are lots ways to check this. I use Notepad++ as my text editor for this because it is easy to use and is widely used by developers.
\nNPP show all characters
Open any text file and click on the pilcrow (¶) button. Notepad++ will show all of the characters with newline characters in either the CR and LF format. If it is a Windows EOL encoded file, the newline characters of CR LF will appear (\\r\\n). If the file is UNIX or Mac EOL encoded, then it will only show LF (\\n).
\nNPP Extended search
\nPress the key combination of Ctrl + Shift + F and select 'Extended' under the search mode. Now search '\\r\\n' - if you find this at end of every line, it means this is a Windows EOL encoded file. However, if it is '\\n' at the end of every line, then it is a Unix or Mac EOL encoded file.
\nHow to convert
\nLet's stick with notepad++ for this, too. Open any file that you would like to convert, click on the Edit menu, scroll down to the EOL conversion option, and select the format that you would like to convert the file to.
\nReference
\n\n","frontmatter":{"date":"September 06, 2017","updated_date":null,"title":"EOL or End of Line or newline ascii character","tags":["Engineering","EOL","LF","Linux","Mac","Windows"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1.7699115044247788,"src":"/static/4f4e5464d0975f41f5388d63c602e499/ee604/eol.png","srcSet":"/static/4f4e5464d0975f41f5388d63c602e499/69585/eol.png 200w,\n/static/4f4e5464d0975f41f5388d63c602e499/497c6/eol.png 400w,\n/static/4f4e5464d0975f41f5388d63c602e499/ee604/eol.png 800w,\n/static/4f4e5464d0975f41f5388d63c602e499/f3583/eol.png 1200w,\n/static/4f4e5464d0975f41f5388d63c602e499/e4d72/eol.png 1280w","sizes":"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px"}}},"author":{"id":"Kundan Singh","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/get-your-free-ssl-certificate/"},"html":"These days SSL is a must-have element for websites, but SSL certificates are costly and range from $30 to $500 per year for a single website. Don’t fret! You can get a FREE SSL certificate! Through “Let's Encrypt\", a free, automated, and open certificate authority, you will be able to acquire the necessary certificate to enable SSL on your website. Check out the below steps you can follow to get an SSL certificate for your site today.
\nTo obtain this certificate, you will first need to prove ownership of the domain. There are two requirements that you need to meet in order to generate a certificate from “Let's Encrypt”:
\nHttp-01:
\nYou will need to setup a directory on your web server's root, and the name of this directory should be “.well-know” and with a “acme-validation” directory included within this. Inside these directories, create a file containing the random string that was provided by the ACME server and this file should serve content which is the random string included in the doc.
Sample Structure
\n/.well-known/acme-validation/&lt;random file name provided by ACME&gt;Dns-01:
\nYou will need to create a .TXT record on the subdomain _acme-challenge. For instance, if you would like to obtain an SSL for the domain “example.com”, then you will need to setup a subdomain on this domain - _acme-challenge.example.com - and the content of the .TXT record will be a random string provided by the ACME server.
\nNow that you have everything setup, how do you get your FREE SSL? Below, we will go over the various ways to enable SSL for free on your website:
\n1. Certbot : certbot is a Linux utility that is simple yet powerful. This tool doesn't share private keys with any servers, and it keeps your private key on the client that is being used to generate the cert. You can install certbot with the following command on ubuntu:
\n$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot\n$ sudo apt-get update\n$ sudo apt-get install certbotThe certbot site has even more details and information for installing this on other systems.
\nOnce installed, open the DNS Manager (must do!) and call the following command to get the SSL certificate for your domain.
\nsudo certbot --text --agree-tos --email &lt;YOUR EMAIL ID&gt; -d &lt;YOUR DOMAIN&gt; --manual --preferred-challenges dns --expand --renew-by-default --manual public-ip-logging-ok certonlyThis command will request that you add the .TXT record on the subdomain _acme-challenge. Once this is added, simply press any key to generate the SSL certificate. It will show the locations of the certified file.
\n2. Online using https://www.sslforfree.com/ : This is also a non-profit site and you can get SSL without any installation; just follow the steps to set up the ACME compliant site structure. They provide an easy step-by-step guide for generating the SSL certificate. Once you work through the guide, you will be able to download a copy of your certificate and include on your webserver.
\n3. Other ways : There are lots of other ways to get the “Let's Encrypt” SSL. This page contains a list of ACME clients and libraries, so you can choose to work with whichever one that best suits your needs.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"July 13, 2017","updated_date":null,"title":"Get your FREE SSL Certificate!","tags":["Engineering","SSL"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/44e96863451de6352d54342c2dd11bf3/bc59e/letsencrypt.png","srcSet":"/static/44e96863451de6352d54342c2dd11bf3/69585/letsencrypt.png 200w,\n/static/44e96863451de6352d54342c2dd11bf3/497c6/letsencrypt.png 400w,\n/static/44e96863451de6352d54342c2dd11bf3/bc59e/letsencrypt.png 512w","sizes":"(max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px"}}},"author":{"id":"Kundan Singh","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/open-source-business-email-validator-by-loginradius/"},"html":"While creating Lead Generation form at LoginRadius, Marketers wanted to sure that visitors enter business emails. To that end, I created a list in JSON format to block free mail providers like Gmail, Outlook etc.
\nBusiness mail validator makes sure users enters only business emails in submission forms on a web page. User can’t enter with free email’s that provided by the third party (free email) service provider.
\nEx. Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, Yahoomail.com, Rediff.com etc.
\nWe can classified business email validation in two ways.
\n1. Client side
\nIn client side validation we use javascript(js) OR jQuery to validate entered the email at time of submission the html form. So we can follow the following steps to validate it on client side.
\n- \n
- First of all create a simple html page with name emailvalidate.html \n
- \n
Add jQuery script on head section
\n
\n<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.2.0/jquery.min.js"></script>\n - Call json file content in a script variable like \n
<script>\n var emailValidator = {\n "123.com": true,\n "123box.net": true,\n "123india.com": true,\n …………………….\n …………………..\n "ymail.com": true,\n "yandex.com": true\n };\n</script>Our complete list is available here
\n- \n
- Add validation form function after you have added above code. \n
<script>\nfunction validateForm(id) {\n var emailValue = jQuery('#'+id).val();\n var emailArray = emailValue.split("@");\n var provider = emailArray[1] ? emailArray[1] : '';\n for(var domain in emailValidator){\n if(emailValidator[domain]){\n if(domain == provider){\n alert("Please Provide Business Email Address.");\n return false;\n }\n }\n }\n return true;\n}\n</script>- \n
- Create html form \n
<form name="myForm" action="emailsubmit.php" onsubmit="return validateForm('business_email');" method="post">\n <input type="text" placeholder="Full Name"/><br>\n <input type="email" id="business_email" name="email" placeholder="Email Address"/><br>\n <input type="submit" value="submit"/>\n </form>Note: if you have already have html form where you want to apply this avalidator, look up for the buysiness_email and replace it accordingly.
\n- \n
- Save the file and try to execute this html page on a browser. \n
2. Server side
\nIn Server side validation we use php scripting language to validate entered email at time of submission the html form. So we can flow the following steps to validate it.
\n- \n
- Create a php page with name of emailsubmit.php \n
- Receive email in php post method by following code. \n
<?php\n$email = isset($_POST[‘email’]) ? trim($_POST[‘email’]):’’;\nif(!empty($email)){\n $tempEmail = explode('@', $email);\n if (isset($tempEmail['1']) && !empty($tempEmail['1'])) {\n $validEmail = json_decode(file_get_contents('freeEmailService.json'), true);\n if (is_array($validEmail) && in_array($tempEmail['1'], array_keys($validEmail))) {\n echo "Please use business email address.";\n }\n }\n}else{\n echo ‘email is required field.’;\n}\n?>- \n
- Save file and upload on server \n
Feel free to add, edit or modify this script as per your requirements. You can contact us if you have any queries.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"April 25, 2017","updated_date":null,"title":"Open Source Business Email Validator By Loginradius","tags":["Engineering"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":0.746268656716418,"src":"/static/bbcfe6f9ef64e0695370aa979325ff56/ab8bb/Open-Source-Business-Validator-By-Loginradius.png","srcSet":"/static/bbcfe6f9ef64e0695370aa979325ff56/69585/Open-Source-Business-Validator-By-Loginradius.png 200w,\n/static/bbcfe6f9ef64e0695370aa979325ff56/ab8bb/Open-Source-Business-Validator-By-Loginradius.png 377w","sizes":"(max-width: 377px) 100vw, 377px"}}},"author":{"id":"Team LoginRadius","github":"LoginRadius","avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/16-javascript-hacks-for-optimization/"},"html":"JavaScript or JS helps implement complex things on web pages. Many of the developers know the importance of an minified Javascript file but few are aware of an Optimized Javascript code.
\nAn optimized code is a combination of smartly programmed logics and small hacks to optimize performance, speed and save time.
\nHere are sweet 16 JS hacks and tips for developers for optimizing Javascript to improve JS performance and improve execution time without affecting server resources.
\n1. Use Array Filter
\nIt is a small hack to filter out bucket of elements from the array pool. This method creates an array filled with all array elements that pass a test (provided as a function). According to requirement create a callback function for non-required elements.
\nIn below example the bucket elements are null and are ready to get filtered out.
\nExample:
\nschema = ["hi","ihaveboyfriend",null, null, "goodbye"]\nschema = schema.filter(function(n) {\n return n\n });Output: ["hi","ihaveboyfriend", "goodbye"]This hack will save some time and lines of codes for developers.
\n2. Using String replace function to replace all the values
\nThe String.replace() function allows you to replace strings using String and Regex.
\nBasically this function replaces the string at its first occurrence. But to replace all using replaceAll() function, use /g at the end of a Regex:
\nExample:
\nvar string = "login login"; \nconsole.log(string.replace("in", "out")); // "logout login" \nconsole.log(string.replace(/in/g, "out")); //"logout logout"3. Use breakpoints and Console for Debugging
\nWith the help of breakpoints or debugging points you can set multiple barriers to rectify source of error at every barrier.
\nPress F11 for next call function and f8 to resume script execution.
\nYou can also check what dynamic values are generated by a function, using console and can check output on different values.
\n4. Convert to floating number without killing performance
\nOften we use math.floor, math.ceil and math.round for eliminating decimals. Instead of using them use “~~” to eliminate decimals for a value.
\nIt is also helpful in increasing performance when it comes to micro optimizations in a code.
\nExample:
\nUse\n\n~~ (math.random*100)\n\nInstead of\n\nmath.round(math.random*100)5. Using length to delete empty in an array
\nThis technique will help you in resizing and emptying an array.
\nFor deleting n elements in an Array, use array.length.
\n array.length = n\n\nSee this example:\n\nvar array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]; \nconsole.log(array.length); // 6 \narray.length = 3; \nconsole.log(array.length); // 3 \nconsole.log(array); // [1,2,3]\n\nFor **emptying array** use\n\narray.length = 0;.Example:
\nvar array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]; \narray.length = 0; \nconsole.log(array.length); // 0 \nconsole.log(array); // []This technique is mostly preferred over any other methods to resize/unset the array elements and is one of the best javascript practices most of the developers follow.
\n6. Merging arrays without causing server load
\nIf your requirement is of merging two arrays, use Array.concat() function
\nFor merging two arrays:
\nvar array1 = [1, 2, 3]; \nvar array2 = [4, 5, 6]; \nconsole.log(array1.concat(array2)); // [1,2,3,4,5,6]; This function works best for small arrays.
\nTo merge large arrays we use
\nArray.push.apply(arr1, arr2)Reason is using Array.concat() function on large arrays will consume lot of memory while creating a separate new array.
\nIn this case, you can use Array.push.apply(arr1, arr2) which instead will merge the second array in the first one, hence reducing the memory usage.
\nExample:
\nvar array1 = [1, 2, 3]; \nvar array2 = [4, 5, 6]; \nconsole.log(array1.push.apply(array1, array2)); // [1,2,3,4,5,6];It will also optimize the performance of your Javascript code irrespective of size of array.
\n7. Use splice to delete array elements
\nThis is probably the one of the best optimization tips for javascript. It optimizes speed of your JS code.
\nUsing splice instead of delete is a good practice, it will save some”null/undefined space” in your code.
\nThe downside of using delete is it will delete the object property, but will not reindex the array or update its length, leaving undefined values. Also it consumes a-lot of time in execution.
\nUsing splice
\nExample
\nmyArray = ["a", "b", "c", "d"] \nmyArray.splice(0, 2) ["a", "b"]\n\nResult: myArray ["c", "d"]8. Checking values in an Object
\nTo check whether an object is empty or not, use
\nObject.keys(YOUR\\_OBJECT).length \n\n// 0 returns if object is emptyFollowing code return the number of elements in an Object.
\n9. Cache the variable
\nCaching the variable tremendously increase javascript performance.
\nEverytime we use document.getElementById() or getElementsByClassName(), JS travels through all elements repeatedly upon each similar element request.
\nIn Order to boost performance, cache your selections to some variable (if using the same selection multiple times).
\nExample:
\nvar cached = document.getElementById('someElement');\ncached.addClass('cached-element');It is a simple optimization tip with drastic impact on performance, recommended for processing large arrays in loop(s).
\nCheck this link for performance results.
\n10. Use switch case instead of if/else
\nGenerally switch cases are used over if/else statements to perform almost the same tasks.
\nThe fact that in switch statements expression to test is only evaluated once, execution time becomes less for the script compared to if/else where for every if , it has to be evaluated.
\n11. Short-circuits conditionals
\nShort circuiting is when a logical operator doesn't evaluate all its arguments.
\nThe code
\nif (loggedin) { \nwelcome\\_messege();\n }Make it short by using combination of a verified variable and a function using && (AND operator) in between both.
\nNow above code can be made in one line
\nloggedin && welcome\\_messege();12. Getting the last item in the array
\nArray.prototype.slice(begin, end) is used to cut arrays when you set the start and end arguments. But if you don't set the end argument, this function will automatically set the max value for the array.
\nA smart hack is it can also accept negative values and by setting a negative number as begin argument, you will get the last elements from the array.
\nvar array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]; \nconsole.log(array.slice(-1)); // [6] \nconsole.log(array.slice(-2)); // [5,6] \nconsole.log(array.slice(-3)); // [4,5,6]13. Default values using || operator
\nIn JS there is a basic rule of having a default value otherwise process will halt at undefined values.
\nTo provide default value in a variable use || to stay away from this most common issue.
\nvar a = a || 'hello'The developer must check whether there are any conflicting values that might be passed to the function to avoid Bugs.
\n14. Beautifying JS code
\nFor beautifying your Javascript code use jsbeautifier. It formats a clumsy JS code into well structured code.
\nCode before Beautifying
\nCode after Beautifying
\n15. Checking JS Performance
\nTo check how well a Javascript code is performing and share results use jsperf. It is easiest way to create and share testcases.
\n16. Online javascript editor
\nJsfiddle and jsbin is a tool for experimenting with your Javascript code and other web languages.
\nIt is also a code sharing site. As you type into one of the editor panels the output is generated in real-time in the output panel.
\nThese are some useful hacks and tips for optimizing javascript performance. It is not mandatory to use them all the time because cases and conditions will vary. If you have tricks other than these, do share with us in comment section.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"April 07, 2017","updated_date":null,"title":"Javascript tips and tricks to Optimize Performance","tags":["Engineering","JavaScript","Hacks","Array"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1.3793103448275863,"src":"/static/f5e8f6ba73e9e3ac28efba4d9492473b/0756a/16-JavaScript-Hacks-to-save-time-and-boost-productivity-768x555.png","srcSet":"/static/f5e8f6ba73e9e3ac28efba4d9492473b/69585/16-JavaScript-Hacks-to-save-time-and-boost-productivity-768x555.png 200w,\n/static/f5e8f6ba73e9e3ac28efba4d9492473b/497c6/16-JavaScript-Hacks-to-save-time-and-boost-productivity-768x555.png 400w,\n/static/f5e8f6ba73e9e3ac28efba4d9492473b/0756a/16-JavaScript-Hacks-to-save-time-and-boost-productivity-768x555.png 768w","sizes":"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px"}}},"author":{"id":"Team LoginRadius","github":"LoginRadius","avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/growth/10-smart-tips-to-make-you-more-resilient-at-office/"},"html":"WHO has pointed out “stress” as the “global health epidemic of 21st century” and it is estimated that it will cost nearly $300 billion every year to American businesses. OMG! That’s a hell lot of money invested (wasted if we can solve it the other way). Studies clear how important it is to fight stress and make things fantastically work even during tough times. Now, with most of us working at highly demanding, always-on, and constantly connected work cultures, how is it possible to stay resilient and sail against all the odds? Well, it is possible and keep in mind that being resilient is only mantra to succeed in your lives. Remember Thomas Edison who failed 1000 times to invent a bulb, too resilient was he! So, why can’t we and why don’t we stop being so delicate? Bounce back fellas and let others see you shine at your workplace with these 10 effective attitude-reforming pills.
\n\n\nResilience is not endurance, it is how you bounce back from your situations
\n
Imagine A Boxing Match
\nThink that you step into a ring and get hit by another boxer. Now, when it’s time-out, you will examine your damage, and think about the measures you should take. You can also take advice from friends and family as if they are your coach. At last, you bounce back with a plan. That’s what resilience is all about. You always bounce back with all your might you can gather.
\nPractice Alertness
\nYou have to meter your alertness and turn towards ways to improve it. Many companies are on the path to introduce mental training sessions that are related to alertness in their professional preliminaries. Julie Corlis, the executive editor of Harvard Heart Letter shows that practicing mindfulness meditation practices can lower stress rates in employees and enhance resilience and commitment to work. The good news is that many online programmes like Be Mindful Online and Mind The Moment are available to serve the purpose. There are some good books and apps you can refer like:-
\nBooks- Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Anti-Stress Dot-to-Dot: Beautiful, calming pictures to complete yourself
\nSome Apps- Mental Workout (iOS & Android), Simple Habit (iOS & Android), Headspace (iOS & Android)
\nHave a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA)
\nHave an optimistic outlook to life to keep you going even when you are down and out. Optimism is not ignoring your problems. Instead, it is thinking that the issues which you are going to face are temporary and you will tackle them with your skills. Believe in yourself and have faith in your instincts when things go wrong. Moreover, realize that the negative things do not last for a long time. This will help you bring back your positivity.
\nCompartmentalize your Mental Load
\nOut of 11 million bits of data coming into our brain every second, our conscious mind can only deal with 40 bits per second. Thus, handle your mind like you handle your mailbox. Treat your brain like a mailbox and compartmentalize your mental load. You should categorize your mental tasks like meetings, problem-solving sessions, and emailing. Try to not to switch randomly between jobs and enjoy one job at a time. It will decrease your mental strain.
\nEmbrace your Stress
\nYes, embrace your stress. Understand that you can smile or you can cry but you cannot escape from stress. So, relax for sometime and then work upon your stress.
\nImprove Your Mental Agility
\nImproving mental agility means improving your quickness to understand the situation. You have to decenter stress to manage the problem effectively. Thus, when you tackle a problem, you will take a pause, observe the situation from a neutral point of view and then come up with a solution.
\nDevelop Compassion
\nIt is very necessary to develop compassion for yourself and for others if you want develop resilience. Greater Good Science Center located at UC Berkeley has researched that being compassionate improves work relationships and enhances collaboration and cooperation at workplace. Developing compassion also decreases stress and increases happiness. It is difficult for an organization, a team or an individual to succeed without compassion.
\nApplaud yourself for Doing Well
\nIt is a habit which can be practiced everywhere, especially at workplace. Work hard on your bloopers but party harder when you have succeeded. Hence, keep in mind to pat your back for at least a thing you did well at the end of the day. And even if nothing goes right, pat your back for your sincere efforts and learn from your mistakes. It will keep you away from the negative aura.
\nBe Flexible
\nIt is common to experience change in work environments. Projects you are a part of can get altered or may be even dropped however accepting that things do change and if possible embracing those changes can make you more resilient.
\nStay Healthy Always
\nNow, last but certainly not the least, always stay healthy. Physical fitness is as important as mental fitness. It is easier to handle challenges when you are healthy. Therefore, eat healthy, exercise regularly, avoid drinking and smoking, and get good amount of sleep.
\nBeing resilient will help you cope with stress in the best way possible. Moreover, companies too are benefited from resilient workforces. Hence, cultivating an organizational work culture which backs compassion and promotes resilience training is a wise business step. However, resilience evolves from your daily habits and attitude and needs determined focus which is applied consistently.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"April 07, 2017","updated_date":null,"title":"10 Smart Tips to Make You More Resilient At Office","tags":["Engineering"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1.7699115044247788,"src":"/static/f6f9c15e3f70a70626b86aa2882d7a10/0edbf/10-Smart-Tips-to-Make-You-More-Resilient-At-Office.png","srcSet":"/static/f6f9c15e3f70a70626b86aa2882d7a10/69585/10-Smart-Tips-to-Make-You-More-Resilient-At-Office.png 200w,\n/static/f6f9c15e3f70a70626b86aa2882d7a10/497c6/10-Smart-Tips-to-Make-You-More-Resilient-At-Office.png 400w,\n/static/f6f9c15e3f70a70626b86aa2882d7a10/0edbf/10-Smart-Tips-to-Make-You-More-Resilient-At-Office.png 560w","sizes":"(max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px"}}},"author":{"id":"Rakesh Soni","github":"oyesoni","avatar":"rakesh-soni.jpg"}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/angular-roster-tutorial/"},"html":"If you're not familiar with Angular I'd highly recommend heading over to the Angular JS resource site and checking out what all the fuss is about. Once you've got a basic understanding of Angular and how to get it up and running this tutorial will show you some of the basic, but awesome features supported by Angular.
\nToday I'm going to be building out a roster for my fantasy football team. If that's not your cup of tea then by all means feel free to substitute the content for whatever floats your boat.
\nPlayers Array
\nThere might not be an I in team, but there are certainly players, so before we do anything in the HTML we'll have to make all the necessary components in the controller. First up let's make an array of all the players we want to include (initially at least) on our team.
\nEvery player is a special little snowflake, and our player objects should reflect that! With this in mind we will make each player an object with his or her own properties like: name, position and team. Here's an example of what our array might look like.
\n$scope.players = [\n {name: "Tom Brady", position: "QB", team: "Patriots"},\n {name: "Tony Romo", position: "QB", team: "Cowboys"},\n {name: "Peyton Manning", position: "QB", team: "Broncos"},\n {name: "Rob Gronkowsi", position: "TE", team: "Patriots"},\n {name: "JJ Watt", position: "DE", team: "Texans"},\n {name: "Lavonte David", position: "LB", team: "Buccaneers"}\n];Repetitive department of repetition
\nNow that we have our roster we can go back to the HTML and make use of Angular's ng-repeat directive. We put the ng-repeat on the element we want to be repeated, keeping in mind that all of its children will also get repeated.
\n<!--\n {{player.name}} - {{player.position}}\n-->Okay so if you're new to Angular there's a couple of things going on here. First like I said we've got the ng-repeat placed on the li (the thing we want repeated) which will create a new li for each player in the players array we defined earlier in the controller. Next up the data binding is being implemented here with each player name as well as position being used as the values for the list item.
\nWhile we're on the topic of data binding, let's throw this in just for fun. Pretty simple, it will calculate the length of your roster and keep it updated as any changes are made.
\n<!--You have {{players.length}} on your roster.-->Easiest Search Functionality of Your Life
\nNext let's add some search functionality to our list. Sounds like a lot of work, probably have to iterate over the array elements, match them to the argument being passed in and... just kidding. With Angular it's a breeze.
\n<!--\n...\n{{player.name}} - {{player.position}}\n-->Donezo.
\nThe shape of Italy
\nLet's imagine one of our fantasy players isn't performing too well (ahem Peyton...) and we want to give him the boot (get it now?).
\nWe'll add a little delete button beside each of our players' names, and since we're doing it for each of them guess how we're going to implement it? That's right with ng-repeat we already have on the list items!
\n<!--{{player.name}} - {{player.position}}\n ×\n-->I'll also tack on a little button with an \"x\" as the content (as a side note, when you want to do this use × instead of \"x\" it looks much nicer). Then we'll attach an ng-click with a delete function where we pass in $index.
\n$index is a neat little feature available with certain Angular directives, and ng-repeat is one of them. It will be assigned the index value (starting at 0) of the position it holds within the array being used with the ng-repeat.
\nThat's all we need in the HTML, so now back in the controller we create a $scope function by the same name used in the HTML and give it a parameter of index. The body of the function is a single line which makes use of the array.splice method where we pass in the index of the item we want to delete, and then 1 to denote that it's only 1 item we want removed.
\n$scope.delete = function (index) {\n $scope.players.splice(index, 1);\n};Acquisitions
\nNow since we just cut someone from the team, we've gotta find their replacement. Let's chuck a few text inputs in there, give them all a respective ng-model to bind with their value and finally another button with an ng-click but this time calling an addPlayer function.
\n<!--\n Name:\n \n Position:\n \n Team:\n \n Add Player\n-->This one's a lil' different from delete, but still super simple. Working from the inside out, we will create a new player object which gets the name, position and team properties from the ng-models on the HTML and then push that object to the players array. After that we clear those values just for some good housekeeping practice.
\n$scope.add = function () {\n $scope.players.push({\n name: $scope.new_name,\n position: $scope.new_position,\n team: $scope.new_team\n });\n $scope.new_name = "";\n $scope.new_position = "";\n $scope.new_team = "";\n};Nothing Lasts Forever
\nNow since this was all done purely on the front end, and didn't make use of cookies, localstorage, or sessionstorage none of this will persist (aka be saved). For that kind of support you'd need some sort of back end, which is beyond the scope of this article.
\nThis was a very rudimentary example of what's possible with Angular JS, so if this interested you at all please dig a little deeper and play around with Angular some more!
\nThat brings us to the end of this tutorial. Feel free to check out the finished (yet unstyled) product here on Codepen
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"January 12, 2016","updated_date":null,"title":"Angular Roster Tutorial","tags":["Engineering","AngularJS","PlayersArray","Array","Search"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/2773860898be140904449814ad319431/ee604/roster-angularjs-1.png","srcSet":"/static/2773860898be140904449814ad319431/69585/roster-angularjs-1.png 200w,\n/static/2773860898be140904449814ad319431/497c6/roster-angularjs-1.png 400w,\n/static/2773860898be140904449814ad319431/ee604/roster-angularjs-1.png 800w,\n/static/2773860898be140904449814ad319431/40ffe/roster-angularjs-1.png 960w","sizes":"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px"}}},"author":{"id":"Zakary Hughes","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/part-2-creating-a-custom-login-form/"},"html":"In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to build a custom login form scratch. This time instead of using the default function call Wordpress provides us, we will create this login form and the styling from scratch, making it a very customized form. I will be providing the CSS I am using, however you may style this however you wish.
\nBuilding a Custom Login Form
\nThis is what WordPress gives us out of the box.. Boring, right?
\nI am going to show this part once again because it is probably the easiest to implement for beginners. I covered this in Part 1, but we'll go through it again just in case you're skipping ahead
\nTo start our page theme you will need to do the following
\n1. Install WordPress\n2. Navigate to your wp-content/themes folder and choose a theme to edit or install a new one\n3. create a file called page-login-custom.php in the theme directory (Notice we are now making a new Page Theme)\n4. Next open that file with a text editor of your choosing and add the following at the top of the php file
\n-->
\nTo initialize this page template make sure to activate the theme you've selected and then navigate to a page or post. On the right hand side of your page/post editor you should now see a dropdown available for template. Change your template to Login Custom and that will attach that page theme to this page/post.
\nNow for the custom code. Below I have provided an example of some code that I have customized to make my custom login form.
\n<form method="post" action="" class="wp-user-form">\n\n:\n<input type="text" name="log" value="" size="20" id="user_login" tabindex="11" />\n\n:\n\nRemember me\n\n<input type="submit" name="user-submit" value="" tabindex="14" class="user-submit" />\n<input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="" />Let's take a look at that custom form
\nHandling the Login Form response
\nTo handle the Login Form response use the exact same method we used in part 1. Remember to place that function within your functions.php file within your theme unless you're building a plugin.
\nIn this example we have built a custom WordPress login form that you could customize and style to your desire. In the next section I will be demonstrating how to build a lost password form that is fully customized. Our custom lost password form will send an email to the user as well as handle creating a new password for the user.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"December 08, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"Part 2 - Creating a Custom Login Form","tags":["Engineering","Login"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/3e9f0e12bae5ff4eea3aa1dae7083c47/6d161/cust-login-2-150x150.png","srcSet":"/static/3e9f0e12bae5ff4eea3aa1dae7083c47/6d161/cust-login-2-150x150.png 150w","sizes":"(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px"}}},"author":{"id":"Zoie Carnegie","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/optimize-jquery-sizzle-element-selector/"},"html":"Almost every active website worldwide uses jQuery, you can check stats here , but using it without optimization might make the DOM very slow. The same goes for other javascript libraries, such as SizzleJS. To ensure the performance of your DOM, you have to follow some best practices for it.
\nIn this article I am going to list down some of the most critical factors that you need to watch out. Even though this not a complete list; taking care of these will help you optimize those jQuery Selector.
\nLet's start!
\nAlways cache your selector
\nWhenever you apply any selector in jQuery or SizzleJS, the selector engine goes through the whole DOM to find the specified element.
\nFor example, if you use the code below, it will go through the whole DOM twice in order to find \".myClass\" selector.
\n$(".myClass").show();\n\n$(".myClass").addClass("anotherClass");But instead of that, if you make all the methods in a chained format like this. It will only try to find that class once.
\n$(".myClass").show().addClass("anotherClass");Or if you want to use this element in other places; you can do so by doing it in this way.
\nvar myElem = $(".myClass");\n\nmyElem.show();\n\nmyElem.addClass("anotherCLass");In both of these cases, the selector will be executed only once. Some selectors are very slow to traverse and passing them again and again will make your DOM very slow.
\nRead on the next point to understand, how the type of selector affects performance.
\nPrioritizing selectors based on their performance
\nSelector's type affects the performance of your site. SizzleJS is a smart selector engine that also uses native js APIs for finding specific element. This is the main reason why ID selector and tag selector perform faster than others. But, if you prefer using jQuery, it’s pretty much the same. Modern browsers also have an API to find an element by class name but, let’s just focus on jQuery and SizzleJS.
\n- \n
- The order of selector's performance (fast -> slow) is \n
- ID selector ($(\"#ID\")) = Fastest \n
- Tag ($(\"Tag\")) = Fast \n
- Class ($(\".Class\")) = Average \n
- Attribute ($(\"[Attribute='Value']\")) = Slow \n
- Pseudo ($(\":pseudo\")) = Slower \n
You can verify performance. In some exceptional cases, the selection of those tags does not matter; It’s all in the combination of the selectors. Because, it affects the performance of your site, let's discuss this on next point.
\nSelecting ID selector first and then other ones
\nIf you have the combination of selectors, then the sequence of selectors matter for optimization. For example:
\n$("#someId div .someClass");The same code can be written as:
\n$("#someId").find("div .someClass");Both of these variant represent the same thing but in the term of performance, second one is better. The reason for that is because in the first code, Sizzle will go through the DOM 3 times to find #someId, div, and .someClass.
\nIn the second one, the selector engine will go through the DOM again but, this time, it’ll only look for #someId and then find the rest inside that element without going through the DOM again.
\nSee how this will affect performance.
\nBeing more specific in right hand side instead of left hand side
\nSizzle executes selector from right to left so it will definitely improve performance if applied in right except left.
\nUnoptimized code:
\n$( "div.myclass .myChildClass" );Optimized code:
\n$( ".myclass td.myChildClass" );If you don’t see the difference, find the div and td.
\nSelection inside a parent always improves performance
\nWhen you have a context, or any level of parent, then you can select an element inside that parent. It will perform better this way than selecting it directly. Because, in this case, the selector engine goes through the DOM once to find the parent.
\nFor example, assuming you are trying to find “.child” class:
\n$(".child");Is slower than
\nvar parent = $("#parent");\n\nparent.find(".child").show();You can also specify context by following syntax
\n$(".child", parent).show();Excessive selector slows down your query
\nThe selector engine always checks every selector you have specified and it might traverse slowly. That being said, always make sure to specify minimum selectors in order to maintain the performance.
\nFor example, you are trying to find “.myClass” using both of these code variants,
\n$("#div div span.myClass");Is slower than
\n$("#div").find(".myClass");\n
The .children() tag is quicker than .find()
\nIn case, you are trying to find a children element, it is recommended to use .children() instead of .find(). Using .find() will tell jQuery to look on every level of children, while .children() will find only the first level children. Therefore .children() is faster than .find().
\nFor example, you are trying to find “.child” inside $parent and it is the first level children of the $parent.
\nparent.find(".child");Is slower than
\nparent.children(".child").show();\n
Use minimum DOM append
\nDOM manipulation is very heavy so always try to ignore or minimize using it.
\nFor example, by using the code below, it will make the process sluggish because you didn’t apply any selector caching. Resulting in going through the DOM ten times and appending an element.
\nfor( var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {\n $(".myClass").append("");\n}But instead of using the above code, using the code below will solve the whole issue of appending and traversal. Not only that, it will merge the 10 times manipulation of DOM into a single call.
\nvar myClassInnerHtml = "";\nfor( var i = 0; i < 10; i++ ){\n myClassInnerHtml += "";\n}\n$(".myClass").append(myClassInnerHtml);All the tips I have mentioned above is highly dependant on your requirement but one thing is for sure; Optimization will definitely improve your process. ‘SizzleJS’ is most the powerful and quick element selector. But, without writing optimized code you can’t prevent the DOM from freezing. With that being said, jQuery is awesome but without optimized code it can get more DOM freezes and frustrate your users.
\nI hope this help you optimize your element selecting. Thank you and have a great coding.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"November 05, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"Optimize jQuery & Sizzle Element Selector","tags":["Engineering","JQuery"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/792265a42f42bb24e4108f2d9f5488be/6d161/jquery-sizzle-element-selector-150x150.png","srcSet":"/static/792265a42f42bb24e4108f2d9f5488be/6d161/jquery-sizzle-element-selector-150x150.png 150w","sizes":"(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px"}}},"author":{"id":"Kundan Singh","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/alternate-authentication-asp/"},"html":"Introduction
\nAuthentication and authorization both are most important things for any system and application. This blog starts with authentication and authorization concepts and after that explains the three default important ways and three custom authentication ways for doing authentication and authorization i.e. windows, forms ,passport, multipass, JWT and SAML authentication. Plus, in this blog I will explain some fundamental concepts about the different authentication system.
\nAuthentication and Authorization
\nAuthentication is the process for checking the identity of a user based on the user’s credentials. Generally, user’s credentials are in the form of user ID and password, and we check their credentials from database or equivalent alternative, if it exists then user is a valid candidate for next process - authorization.
\nAuthorization also known as “Permission Control” will come after authentication. Authorization is the process of deciding what kind of resource a user can access based on their identity and checking whether the authenticated user has sufficient rights to access the requested resources. Typically a resource can be an ASP.NET web page, media files (MP4, GIF, JPEG etc), compressed file (ZIP, RAR) etc.
\nASP.NET default authentication Providers
\n1. Form Authentication
\nNormally, form authentication is based on cookies, the authentication and permission settings are stored in cookies. However, we can also use form authentication without cookies, and in cookie-less form authentication we can use query string for passing user details. Remember, the key concept is always ONLY allow the user with correct credential also enough permission to view certain resources, so we need to capture their information and compare with what we have stored in the database. And no matter what kind of form authentication we use, after we receive the data on server end, we will compare them with the data stored in any storage method/provider. For example, we can store username and password in the web.config file, a JSON file, or a database table.
\nForms authentication flow:
\n- \n
- When a user requests a page for the application, ASP.NET checks session cookie. If the cookie exists and valid, ASP.NET assumes the user is authenticated and processes the request. \n
- If session cookies does not exists or not valid then it redirect to login form. \n
- User will enter username and password and if they are valid then he will get authenticated and authorized. \n
2. Passport Authentication
\nPassport authentication is a centralized authentication service provided by Microsoft. The .NET Passport single sign-in service. When we use passport authentication then user authentication in your application is managed by Microsoft's passport service. Passport authentication uses encrypted cookies to manage the authentication.
\nHow Password authentication works Users do not need to retype their sign-in name and password when moving from site to site. Those .NET Passport–enabled sites will issue a set of encrypted cookies in the .NET Passport central servers' domain to facilitate silent and seamless sign-in across sites. In some cases, sites owners will first redirect their end-users to .NET Passport sign-in and to authenticate upon first viewing of their site. If the users are logged in already, they'll get authenticated by ASP.NET, and if they are not logged in they will get redirected to passport servers (i.e hotmail, Live etc.) to login first. If user successfully authenticates himself, it will return a token to your website.
\n3. Windows Authentication
\nWe use windows authentication when we are creating a web application for a limited number of users who already have Windows account and this type of authentication is quite useful in an intranet environment. This authentication method uses local users windows account 'credentials' for to validate the user. Dot Net web application generally hosted on IIS(Internet Information Server) so the requests go directly to IIS to provide the authentication process in a Windows-based authentication model.
\nThe entire responsibility of authentication is done by IIS. It first takes the user’s credentials from the domain login. If this process fails, IIS displays an alert dialog box so the user can enter or re-enter his login information.
\nWindows authentication have some advantages and disadvantages:
\nWindows authentication Advantage
\n- \n
- Developers need to write less line of code for managing user's authentication. \n
- Users can use their existing windows accounts for login. \n
Windows authentication dis-Advantage
\n- \n
- You can't control windows authentication process. \n
- Windows authentication only works on Microsoft OS you can't use it on others OS. \n
4. Custom authentication Provider
\n- \n
- Multipass \n
Multipass authentication is a single sign on authentication. Suppose you have multiple sites and you want to create a single account for a user on both sites then you can use Single Sign-On. Single Sign-On is authentication system it allow user to share his authentication details with your there site. This allows a seamless experience for your users without forcing them to create a separate account on your second site. A multipass is simply a hash of keys and values, provided as an AES encrypted JSON hash.
\n- \n
- JWT (JSON Web token) \n
JWTs represent a set of claims as a JSON object that is encoded in a JWS and/or JWE structure. This JSON object is called “JWT Claims Set”. The JSON object consists of zero or more name/value pairs (or members), where the names are strings and the values are arbitrary JSON values. These members are the claims represented by the JWT.
\nYour JWTs can contain any information you want; the user's name, birthdate, email, etc. You do this with claims based authorization. You then just tell your provider to make a JWT with these claims from the claims principle.
\n- \n
- SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) \n
SAML - Security Assertion Markup Language SAML. SAML is developed by the Security Services Technical Committee of \"Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards\" (OASIS). SAML is an XML-based framework for exchanging user authentication. The purpose of SAML is to enable Single Sign-On for web applications across various domains.
\nSAML have three components: assertions, protocol, and binding. Assertions are authentication, attribute, and authorization. Authentication assertion validates the user's identity. Attribute assertion contains specific information about the user. And authorization assertion identifies user role and permissions.
\nSAML works with multiple protocols including Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and also supports SOAP
\nSummary
\nDifferent authentication methods are available, and website’s owner always gets confused about which authentication method they should use, here I have explained some of the popular authentication and authorization methods, hope it made it a little bit clear for you. And I will provide some in-depth details about each type of authentication in my next blog, happy coding.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"October 01, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"Types of Authentication in Asp.Net","tags":["Engineering","Authentication","Asp.Net","Multipass","JWT","JSON Web Token"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/09593e63090dd5b6ec6f5258209a953b/6d161/alternate-authentication-asp-dot-net1-150x150.png","srcSet":"/static/09593e63090dd5b6ec6f5258209a953b/6d161/alternate-authentication-asp-dot-net1-150x150.png 150w","sizes":"(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px"}}},"author":{"id":"Team LoginRadius","github":"LoginRadius","avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/my-name-is-darryl-this-is-how-work/"},"html":"Ever wondered how I work? No? Well, too bad, I'm still gonna write about it. Hello and welcome to a blog post dedicated to me. In this episode, I'm going to tell you about the tools I use, the things I do to get design inspiration, and what I do when I get stuck on a project.
\nLet's get started!
\nTools I use
\nCoffee
\nLet's face it, you all know this is the number 1 priority for pretty much everyone you know. Getting my fuel up and over driving my brain... And hope to god I don't break down in the middle of the day.
\nSublime Text 3
\nThe Photoshop to my coding skills. Sure, there are other text editors out there but this one really knows what it's doing. I have come to the point where I've installed so many Sublime Packages that I cannot function without them.
\nSome of those packages are:
\n- \n
- Emmet Boy, oh boy, Let me tell you about Emmet. But, it would take a long time to explain what it is, so just go to their site. It's basically premade snippets for pretty much everything you need. \n
- SidebarEnhancementSublime's sidebar is a little bit underdeveloped. Then again, that's what packages are for, right? This nifty little package ehances your sidebar with more options to choose from like: 'Reveal...' (which opens the file folder). \n
- ColorHighlighterIf you're the kind of person who remembers the hex code for colors, you are one talented individual. Ya see, it's hard to visualize colors using hex code. ColorHighlighter puts a background on those colors for you to easily visualize what kind of color #00427c is (regal blue, btw). \n
- SFTPThis one is a cool package. It lets you edit, sync, and save on-upload files from any of your sftp or ftp servers. But only if you configure it properly. If you use any preprocessors and you're worried that you have to upload the processed file manually. Worry no more as you can make sftp monitor that file if it has changed and automatically upload it. Pretty neat, huh? \n
And since we're talking about sublime and packages, check out this nifty blog about sublime text and their packages.
\nCodekit
\nIf you don't know what is codekit, you should. It compiles everything from SASS to HAML to Coffeescript. It also auto refresh your browser on every save. It... it just works. Bower is also built-in so you have access to over 6,000 components. Best part? No command line usage. Just drop your project files and go.
\nWhat I do to get inspired.
\nAs a normal human being — and not an extraterrestrial or alien as you tiny humans may call it. I tend to get stuck in a design black hole. It is where every ideas you have is just 1 big blank canvas — or as some artists call it \"modern art\". So what do I do when I don't have any ideas? It's simple really. The first website I go to is dribbble.com. Dribble used to be an invite-only social network for designers. I think they probably opened their doors to everyone. I'm not really sure. But, I am sure that most of the designers there are still the best of the best. What I really like about it is when some designers show how their designs interact with users. With the help of GIF or codepen. Speaking of codepen, That's the place I go to if I am in need of some CSS trickery. At some point, I do get inspiration from that place too. If dribbble can't help my —oh so in the dark— brain, I go to Pinterest. Pinterest have their own design category with a bunch of different sub categories from Graphic Design to UI/UX. The best thing about it? It links back to another site with more design inspiration. YAY for Pinterest.
\nGetting out of a sticky situation
\nNow that my brain is full of design food. How do I put it to work? There's this thing called a notebook. If you don't know what that is. It looks like this.
Hey there, spider. It’s me again, your amazing blog writer, Darryl. Have you ever wanted to select the second or third child of an element without using CSS3 nth-child —which aren’t working on grandpa browsers. Let’s face it, a lot of human beings are afraid of change that they tend to stick to what they know.
\nI’m not a pro “support the older browser” kind of guy because I still think that people won’t upgrade if we keep spoiling them. But for the sake of knowing a workaround I’m gonna teach you how to ab-use sibling selectors for better compatibility.
\nWhat are sibling selectors.
\nSibling selectors consists of a squiggly line ( ~ ) and a plus sign ( + ).
\nSquiggly line selects all the siblings below that element where you use that sign. Plus sign select only the next sibling.
\nGreat, give me the deets.
\nHave you ever seen our support docs?
\nWould you believe me if I tell you that from “Getting Started” to the “Social Sharing” section, they are all siblings with the same class and everything… well except for the css code and the search, we’ll get to that later.
\nAnyhoo, how did I do it? It’s easy, since I know that the sibling I want to get was the first child. I just used the :first child pseudo element to style the first element.
\n.sibling:first-child {\n/*styles for first sibling*/\n}Then again, that’s not a sibling selector, that’s a pseudo element. Calm your feets, this is the part where we ab-use those selectors.
\n.sibling:first-child ~ .sibling {\n/*styles for the rest of the sibling*/\n}Why would we do this? This is so it doesn’t add the style for the rest of the sibling to the first-child and vice versa. Less CSS to overwrite and eliminates the use of !important.
\nLet’s go crazy.
\nHow do we get the third child without using :nth-child pseudo element? It’s simple. Get the first child and ab-use your plus sign(+) sibling selector.
\n<div:first-child + div + div {\n/*styles*/\n}The best part is. It’s backwards compatible.
\nWhat about the 12th child? Well, you can just painfully type all those “+ div”.
\nNow, why would we do this? To support IE8, which I don’t like supporting but, maybe you do.
\nKeep experimenting with this technique and be free from any restrictions of IE8.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"August 18, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"How to ab-USE CSS2 sibling selectors","tags":["Engineering","Selector","CSS"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/945890eb5408214619f2dbcdf3da2fcf/7d145/sibling-selectors.png","srcSet":"/static/945890eb5408214619f2dbcdf3da2fcf/69585/sibling-selectors.png 200w,\n/static/945890eb5408214619f2dbcdf3da2fcf/497c6/sibling-selectors.png 400w,\n/static/945890eb5408214619f2dbcdf3da2fcf/7d145/sibling-selectors.png 610w","sizes":"(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px"}}},"author":{"id":"Team LoginRadius","github":"LoginRadius","avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/api-debugging-tools/"},"html":"Are you having trouble with accessing API endpoint? Unsure why your API is not returning data? Most modern browsers have tools or plugins that allows you to quickly and easily test your API calls and see the sample returned data. In this post we go through some tools available for common browsers and web tools that will cut down the total troubleshooting time.
\nGoogle Chrome
\nChrome offers a wide variety of apps that are quick and easy to install through the Chrome app webstore. Postman is one of those app and it offers a very robust REST API testing solution. It allows you to quickly create and format a wide range of API calls, and keeps a record of previously accessed APIs for easy reference and reuse. Postman have an easy to understand interface that allows you to quickly reformat the included parameters, headers, and form data. Returned data can be viewed in multiple different formats depending on your preferences.
\nAnother added benefit of Postman is its built-in support for common authentication procedures like: Basic Auth, Digest Auth, and OAuth 1.0/2.0. These \"helpers\" allow you to bypass some of the common tasks that can be troublesome in the mentioned protocols such as signing your request(OAuth 1.0) or requesting an Access token(OAuth 2.0).
\nMozilla Firefox
\nPoster or RestClient are both useful tools that allow you to test out your API calls within Mozilla Firefox. They offer many similar systems as Postman, allowing you to set various parts of your API quickly and easily. With built in features to set such as Base URL, Auth method, Timeout, Action, Content, headers, and query parameters; It returns a complete response object allowing you to troubleshoot APIs before integrating them into your systems. Both RestClient and Poster allow you to save your requests for future use.
\nOther Systems
\nRunscope: This is a powerful tool that allows you to set up test cases for your APIs. Which makes it easy for you to not only handle many of the features as described in the above two systems, but to also schedule these requests to perform periodically. This allows you to monitor your APIs and have email notifications sent out when specific conditions are met. You can also mask the API requests to run them from different locations worldwide allowing you to test user cases from a global audience.
\nSoapUI: This is an extremely robust solution that can handle your entire testing environment. It also have built in features to test out RESTful API calls, as well as SOAP calls. This solution is very extensive and has many options that cover the full suite of features detailed in the above technologies. On top of that, they have a well formatted instructions available on their site, detailing how to setup and configure the program.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"May 26, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"API Debugging Tools","tags":["Engineering","GoogleChorme","MozilaFirefox","SoupUI","RunScope"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/949b6e4da71216d7a55b82e01a8bcaa1/630fb/api_debugging-tools-300x300.png","srcSet":"/static/949b6e4da71216d7a55b82e01a8bcaa1/69585/api_debugging-tools-300x300.png 200w,\n/static/949b6e4da71216d7a55b82e01a8bcaa1/630fb/api_debugging-tools-300x300.png 300w","sizes":"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}}},"author":{"id":"Karl Wittig","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/getting-started-phonegap/"},"html":"PhoneGap now also known as Apache Cordova, is a powerful tool for mobile development which allows you to develop in HTML/JS markup and quickly generate out various mobile compatible apps. This prevents your developers from having to learn and understand multiple platform specific languages and instead use the PhoneGap framework which is based in HTML to create the app and then generate it into any one of the following platforms:
\n- \n
- iOS \n
- Android \n
- Windows Phone \n
- Windows \n
- Firefox OS \n
- Amazon Fire OS \n
- Blackberry \n
With time saved on learning development languages for the above platforms your team can focus on the features of your app.
\nSetting up your Environment
\n- \n
- Download and install node.js, This will be used to install the Cordova/PhoneGap framework. \n
- Download and install a Git Client, This is used by the Cordova/PhoneGap framework when creating projects. \n
- Open command prompt and verify that both of the above systems have been installed by running npm and git. \n
- Install the Cordova/PhoneGap system by running the following command in your command prompt (Note: this may take a few minutes) \n
C:\\>npm install -g cordovaVerify your installation of Cordova/PhoneGap by running cordova in command prompt. This should display a list of the available Cordova commands.
\nSetting up your Project
\n- \n
- Create a directory which will contain your PhoneGap/Cordova project code. \n
- Open the created directory in command line and create a project with the command cordova create < sitename > \n
C:\\>rootdir\\cordova create FirstSite- \n
- \n
This will create a project in the root folder with the specified site-name. This project will contain:
\n- \n
- \"hooks\" directory- Contains special scripts that can be used to customize Cordova commands. \n
- \"platforms\" directory- This contains the app specific projects that you will include below. \n
- \"plugins\" directory- Contains add-on code for interfacing with native features. You can create your own custom interface or use one of pre-compiled plugins. \n
- \"www\" directory- Contains the PhoneGap/Cordova structure and some standard js and css files. \n
- config.xml file- This file contains meta data for controlling common features of your apps like the app title, description and author. \n
\n - \n
Add platforms to the project with the cordova platform add
\ncommand. Note: adding platforms requires that the relevant dependencies are installed in your system for example adding android requires that you have installed the Android SDK. Available platforms for a windows environment are: - \n
- wp7 \n
- wp8 \n
- windows8 \n
- amazon-fireos \n
- android \n
- blackberry10 \n
- firefoxos \n
And for Mac:
\n- \n
- ios \n
- amazon-fireos \n
- android \n
- blacberry10 \n
- firefoxos \n
\nC:\\>rootdir\\cordova platform add android\n - \n
You can now get a list of the added platforms by running the following command:
\n
\nC:\\>rootdir\\cordova platform ls\n - \n
You can remove a specific platform from the list with the following command:
\n
\nC:\\>rootdir\\cordova platform remove android\n - Once you have added in the desired platforms build the platform specific apps by running the following command: \n
Note: Building platforms requires that the relevant dependencies are installed in your system for example building android requires that you have installed the Android SDK
\nC:\\>rootdir\\cordova build- \n
- You can use these built projects found in the \"platforms\" directory in platform specific IDEs or emulate the projects directly with the following command: \n
C:\\>rootdir\\cordova emulate androidAt this point you have a basic PhoneGap project configured and your desired platforms added and you can get started with adding or building out additional features and content in the \"www\" directory and run the command in step 7 above to create the platform specific projects. You can find detailed instructions on setting up additional features and implementing PhoneGap on the PhoneGap site.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"March 31, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"Getting Started with Phonegap","tags":["Engineering","PhoneGap","Mobile"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/d8c820456aa3a57aa0a36aab4d27f8fc/40725/dev-sprites2.png","srcSet":"/static/d8c820456aa3a57aa0a36aab4d27f8fc/69585/dev-sprites2.png 200w,\n/static/d8c820456aa3a57aa0a36aab4d27f8fc/497c6/dev-sprites2.png 400w,\n/static/d8c820456aa3a57aa0a36aab4d27f8fc/40725/dev-sprites2.png 580w","sizes":"(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px"}}},"author":{"id":"Team LoginRadius","github":"LoginRadius","avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/guid-query-mongo-shell/"},"html":"If you have stored a GUID through the C# driver to mongoDB and now you want to run a query by GUID, you can't query directly because mongoDB doesn't recognize GUID so when we query through mongo shell no result will be returned. To use the power of mongo shell for querying data on mongo by GUID, you should follow these steps.
\n1. Convert GUID data to Base64
\nConvert you GUID data to base64 , you can use any online tool for this.
\nSo suppose your GUID is: 00112233-4455-6677-8899-aabbccddeeff
\nThen the base 64 version will be: MyIRAFVEd2aImaq7zN3u/w==
\n2. Query by BinData object in mongo shell
\ndb.Users.find({"useUniqueId": new BinData(3,"MyIRAFVEd2aImaq7zN3u/w==")}).limit(1)Actually BinData constructor takes 2 parameters:
\nNew BinData(subtype,data)
\n- \n
- Subtype: represent subdata type like we pass 3 for UUID or GUID \n
- Data: base64 encoded string data \n
mongoDB's C# driver stores data to mongo by converting it into binary data rather than string.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"February 23, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"GUID Query Through Mongo Shell","tags":["Engineering","GUID","Mongo"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/ea7595df20b2f7c29ed276dc27b05c9b/630fb/mongo-db-guid.png","srcSet":"/static/ea7595df20b2f7c29ed276dc27b05c9b/69585/mongo-db-guid.png 200w,\n/static/ea7595df20b2f7c29ed276dc27b05c9b/630fb/mongo-db-guid.png 300w","sizes":"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}}},"author":{"id":"Kundan Singh","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/social-provider-social-sharing-troubleshooting-resources/"},"html":"Social Sharing is an extremely powerful tool to expand your user base and product recognition, customizing and implementing this to be efficient on your site can be quiet difficult. Most of the most relevant Social Providers have setup testing and troubleshooting tools that can help to identify where you have gone astray. Below is a brief overview of some useful tools that have been setup to assist with implementing custom Social Sharing options.
\nFacebook Open Graph Object Debugger
\nSetting up custom sharing with Facebook uses Facebook Open Graph meta tags, which are cached on Facebooks end and can lead to some confusion when making updates to your customizations. In order to identify the cached details that are being used for your implementation Facebook provides the Open Graph Debugger tool. All you need to do is input your sites URL and click on Debug.
\nThis will then crawl your page and display some useful information on the currently scraped details and warnings and error messages. It also give you the option at this point to refresh this scrapped data with any changes that you have made to our existing cached details.
\nGoogle Structured Data Testing Tool
\nGoogle uses a combination of a few different methods in order to define the customized sharing options:
\n- \n
- Structured Data Markup- HTML markup detailed on Schema.org. \n
- Open Graph Tags- Turn your page into a rich data object, commonly used to customize Facebook sharing details. Information on the markup is available on ogp.me \n
- Title or Meta Description- HTML attributes that provide details on the site. \n
- Googles best guess- If none of the above are included, Google will crawl your page and try to interpret the most suitable details to include in the share. \n
The structured data testing tool allows you to view what Google has interpreted from your webpage. Start by entering the URL of the page that you are sharing and click on preview.
\nInsert the URL in the \"URL to be shared field\" and click on Get Code. This will generate a sample share icon in the preview section.
\nTo test the share functionality click on the generated icon to display the share interface as determined by the provided URL.
\nTwitter Button Generator Tool
\nTwitter also uses multiple systems to determine the content that will be tweeted by the tweet buttons. The most commonly used meta tags, which allow you to set any of the available customizable fields in your tweet.
\nTo test the tweet you can use Twitters button generator. Select the \"Share a link\" option under \"Choose a button\".
\nInput your site URL in the \"share URL\" field, This will cause the Tweet button under \"Preview and code\" to be updated.
\nClick on the generated button to see a sample of the Tweet that has be defined by your URL.
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"February 09, 2015","updated_date":null,"title":"Social Provider Social Sharing Troubleshooting Resources","tags":["Engineering","SocialSharing","Facebook","Google","LinkedIn"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1.5037593984962405,"src":"/static/ca57c9bd893c5ad9ae9e68ee6a62ddd8/ee604/social.png","srcSet":"/static/ca57c9bd893c5ad9ae9e68ee6a62ddd8/69585/social.png 200w,\n/static/ca57c9bd893c5ad9ae9e68ee6a62ddd8/497c6/social.png 400w,\n/static/ca57c9bd893c5ad9ae9e68ee6a62ddd8/ee604/social.png 800w,\n/static/ca57c9bd893c5ad9ae9e68ee6a62ddd8/f3583/social.png 1200w","sizes":"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px"}}},"author":{"id":"Karl Wittig","github":null,"avatar":null}}}},{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/engineering/hello-developers-and-designers/"},"html":"Welcome to our new initiative to contribute and spread the learnings/findings we had working with LoginRadius API!
\nWe always try to come up with new ideas/process during our development and research sessions..sometimes they are funny but awesome. :). We'll share those ideas and experiences.look forward for your comments/feedback!
\n--
\nLoginRadius Engineering team
\n","frontmatter":{"date":"May 02, 2014","updated_date":null,"title":"Hello developers and designers!","tags":["Engineering"],"coverImage":{"childImageSharp":{"fluid":{"aspectRatio":1,"src":"/static/61bc9402fec623803bf04d21e948e84a/2a4de/desdev.png","srcSet":"/static/61bc9402fec623803bf04d21e948e84a/69585/desdev.png 200w,\n/static/61bc9402fec623803bf04d21e948e84a/497c6/desdev.png 400w,\n/static/61bc9402fec623803bf04d21e948e84a/2a4de/desdev.png 600w","sizes":"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"}}},"author":{"id":"Team LoginRadius","github":"LoginRadius","avatar":null}}}}]}},"pageContext":{"tag":"Engineering"}},"staticQueryHashes":["1171199041","1384082988","2100481360","23180105","528864852"]}