Manage Sessions Over HTTPS With Node.js And Vue.js

A long time ago when I had been exploring session management in Node.js, I had written a tutorial titled, Session Management in Your Express.js Web Application. This was a basic tutorial that is still very functional today, however little things have changed since then when it comes to how the web works. For example, in 2015 HTTPS was never a requirement and we weren’t exposed to all the frontend web frameworks that exist today.

When you start introducing things into your web applications such as HTTPS or micro-services that operate on different origins or ports, or frontend frameworks, session management can get a little more complicated. We’re going to see how to maintain a session for a user using Node.js with Express.js on our backend and Vue.js on our frontend, in this tutorial.

U2F Authentication With A YubiKey Using Node.js And jQuery

About a week ago I had written about using HTTPS with Node.js and hinted at hardware based two-factor authentication as my reason for needing it. In case you’re unfamiliar with 2FA, there are numerous approaches ranging from HMAC-based one-time passwords (HOTP) and time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) which are software based, to the hardware based universal two-factor (U2F) standard.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you’ll remember I had written a tutorial titled, Implement 2FA with Time-Based One-Time Passwords in a Node.js API, which focused on the software side of things. I recently picked up some YubiKey dongles and thought I’d try my luck with the hardware side of things.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to implement U2F functionality in our Node.js powered RESTful API and interact with the API and our hardware dongles using jQuery in the web browser.

Create A Self-Signed Certificate For Node.js On MacOS

I recently picked up a Yubico U2F hardware key and thought I’d try to create a web application that was protected with two-factor hardware-based authentication. Things were going smooth until I realized that it is mandatory to be using HTTPS within your application, even when testing locally. HTTPS is common, but I’d never actually set it up with Node.js because I had always been using services like Cloudflare that configure it for you. The problem is that these services are for live domain names, not necessarily localhost.

While we’re not going to explore U2F hardware keys in this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at creating and installing a self-signed certificate for use in Node.js within macOS.

How To Build Reusable Angular Components And Share Them With The World

As you probably know, Angular is all about building UI components. There are several excellent component libraries out there that you can use to build your own application, such as Angular Material, Clarity or Kendo UI to name a few.

Such libraries provide common reusable components such as tabs, date pickers, collapsible menus, and much more. Still, there’s always a time where we need something more customized and more adapted to the specific needs of our project.

If you ever get in that spot where you want to create a component that might be reused in different projects, or if you want to write components that you would then open-source, this article is for you.

Using An Exit Intent Listener To Manage Popups On A Page

Not too long ago I wrote a tutorial titled, Create an Email Subscription Popup with jQuery, that demonstrated how to create popup modals within your web application. In this example the modals were presented on a timer. If you hadn’t noticed, and I think most people did, The Polyglot Developer was using those modals for newsletter subscriptions exactly as demonstrated in the tutorial. The problem was that changes to the user experience on a timer felt intrusive no matter how long the timer. This was further validated through user feedback.

The feedback, which I always take seriously, lead me to changing how the modals were presented. Instead of using a timer, I had switched them to appear based on the users intent to leave the page or site. For clarity, an exit intent happens when the mouse leaves the website to interact with other things on the computer or within the browser.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to take action based on exit intents with simple JavaScript as well as jQuery.

Web Services For The JavaScript Developer, First Edition

I am pleased to announce the release of my first ever eBook titled, Web Services for the JavaScript Developer, which focuses on the development of REST and GraphQL APIs using JavaScript, Node.js, and various frameworks.

The book was designed to help make you successful at modeling and validating your data, designing queries, and anything related to creating web services.

Analyze Stack Overflow Data With Golang And HTTP

I was recently tasked with a project where I needed to gather data from Stack Overflow so it could be easily evaluated without having to dig around the website. Stack Exchange has many REST APIs available, some of which that don’t even need tokens or authentication, so it came down to how I wanted to consume this data.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to consume question and comment data from the Stack Exchange API using Golang and then export it to comma separated value (CSV) for further evaluation.