Author: Nic Raboy

Simple Data Processing With JavaScript And The HERE API

August 1, 2018 Nic Raboy

Have you ever needed to work with comma separated value (CSV) data that wasn't formatted in a great way or figure out complete address information based on very little provided address information? While unrelated, these two topics come up quite a bit, more frequently when I'm dealing with person information or lead data that I retrieve from conferences and other events.

The great thing is that we live in a time where plenty of development libraries and services exist to make this process of data parsing and manipulation easy to accomplish in an automated fashion.

We're going to see how to take a CSV file representing partially complete people data and convert it to JSON. Then we're going to fill in the gaps when it comes to the geolocation side of things, using the HERE Geocoder API.

Serve Your Web Applications With Minimal Effort Using Caddy

July 30, 2018 Nic Raboy

I've been in the web game for quite some time and have my fair share of web server software. I've used Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS), Apache httpd, as well as NGINX, and while they all thrive in their own ways, they've been overkill for most of my use cases. This is where Caddy comes in, a lightweight alternative to these seasoned, but often heavy web servers.

We're going to see how to use Caddy and learn why it is so powerful while using minimal effort on a developer operations side.

7 Problems With Hybrid Mobile Development And How NativeScript Solves Them

July 25, 2018 Nic Raboy

I've been a mobile application developer since 2010 and I've played around with my fair share technologies and frameworks. While I've developed applications that can be safely classified as vanilla native or core native using Java, I've spent most of my time developing cross platform applications for Android and iOS using frameworks such as Ionic Framework and NativeScript that support web technologies.

The convenience of cross platform development with web technologies doesn't come without penalty for certain frameworks. After all, mobile development frameworks can be split into a hybrid web category which act as web applications bundled into a mobile application and a native mobile category which act as web applications compiled into a mobile application. The difference being in my use of bundled vs compiled.

We're going to see some of the problems that developers face when choosing to use a hybrid development framework such as, but not limited to, Ionic Framework vs a native development framework such as NativeScript.

Releasing An Android Application Built With NativeScript And Vue.js

July 23, 2018 Nic Raboy

So you've just built an awesome new Android application using NativeScript and the Vue.js JavaScript framework and you're wondering what's next. Unless this is an internal application, you're probably going to want to publish the application to a marketplace like Google Play. The thing is, up until now, you've probably only been working with a debug build of your Android application and binary.

We're going to see how to take a NativeScript application that uses Vue.js and build an Android binary for release using a signing key and some command line magic.

Give That Slow Hybrid Mobile App A Native Performance Boost With NativeScript

July 18, 2018 Nic Raboy

When it comes to hybrid mobile application development, there is always discussion around the performance of said applications. While hybrid mobile applications have come a long way in terms of performance since the early days, they still can't quite live up to the performance expectations that are delivered in a native application.

We're going to take a look at why hybrid applications suffer in the speed department and how other similar frameworks such as NativeScript can take your applications to the next level without severe changes to design or development.

JWT Authorization In A GraphQL API Using Golang

July 11, 2018 Nic Raboy

If you've been keeping up, you'll remember I released a very popular tutorial titled, Getting Started with GraphQL Using Golang which was more or less a quick-start to using GraphQL in your web applications. Since then, I demonstrated an alternative way to work with related data in a tutorial titled, Maintain Data Relationships Through Resolvers with GraphQL in a Golang Application. Both articles are great, but they left out an important feature that most modern APIs must have. Most modern APIs must have a way to authorize particular users to access only certain pieces of data and not all data offered by the service.

One of the most popular ways to enforce some kind of authorization in an application is through the use of JSON web tokens (JWT). Users authenticate with a service and the service responds with a JWT to be used in every future request so that way the password is kept safe. The service can then validate the JWT to make sure it is correct and not expired.

We're going to see how to protect particular GraphQL properties as well as entire queries using JSON web tokens and the Go programming language.

Protect GraphQL Properties With JWT In A Node.js Application

July 2, 2018 Nic Raboy

So you started playing around with GraphQL and Node.js. Did you happen to get up to speed with my previous tutorial titled, Getting Started with GraphQL Development Using Node.js? Regardless on how you've jumped into GraphQL, you're probably at a time where you need to figure out how to protect certain queries or pieces of data from the general public through some kind of permissions or roles.

When building a RESTful API, the common approach to endpoint protection is with JSON web tokens (JWT). In fact, I even wrote a previous tutorial on the subject, but how does that have relevance to GraphQL?

We're going to take the common JWT approach and apply it towards protecting queries as well as particular pieces of data in a GraphQL API created with Node.js.