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.

Angular Route Guards For Authorization In A Web And Mobile Application

July 13, 2018 Corbin Crutchley

You're about to release your new Angular web app. It's a photo sharing site and you want to test it, so you send a link to it to your hacker sister. She's always messing with your stuff and she found out the URL to your admin page you added to your web app. Before you know it, she's flushed your database using a button on that admin page that you didn't restrict access to. Not a problem when using development data - but I'm sure your users wouldn't be any too keen on a service where they lost all of their data. Let's fix that

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.

Including Attractive Charts In Your Angular Web Application

June 27, 2018 Nic Raboy

It's probably obvious, but most modern applications crave data and in many of those scenarios, being able to visualize the data is a necessity. This is where charting and graphs become valuable within frontend applications. Having attractive charts in your application can make a world of difference and with a convenient library like Chart.js, it isn't complicated.

If you've been keeping up, you'll remember I wrote a tutorial titled, Use Chart.js to Display Attractive Charts in a Vue.js Web Application which focused on Vue.js. This time around we're going to see how to include charts in an Angular web application.

Mapping Volumes Or Passing Environment Variables To Containerized Docker Applications

June 13, 2018 Nic Raboy

If you've ever worked with Docker containers you've probably been exposed to them being stateless, meaning when a container is destroyed, all record of it is lost including any files it might have created. Not great if you're working with say a database, correct? However, let's look at this from a different angle. Let's say you are deploying a web application that requires some configuration. Depending on how you've developed it, the configuration could be controlled via a file or via environment variables. How do you accommodate this with Docker container deployments when you don't want these configurations baked into the image?

We're going to see how to work with volume mapping between container and host machines as well as passing environment variables at container deployment with Docker.