Using NW.js To Convert A Website Into A Desktop Application

A while ago, I ran into a situation where I needed to make web application into a desktop application for a corporate client. The idea was to leverage as much of the existing app as possible, while still meeting the requirement of having a “desktop” application.

As a primarily Java developer, I had no idea how to do this, so I started doing research and found out that my best bet would be using JavaScript technologies.

Enter NW.js, a powerful mashup of Google Chrome and Node.js that allows you to package a web application to be run on the desktop.

TPDP Episode #20: GraphQL For API Development

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is available for download! If you’ve been keeping up with the blog recently, I’ve published quite a bit of content around GraphQL as I personally believe it to be the future for API development. Being able to access related and unrelated data on demand through a single endpoint is huge for the people consuming your data and huge for the developers creating the data because of specific model definitions.

In this episode titled, GraphQL for API Development, I’m joined by Lee Byron, one of the co-creators of GraphQL at when he worked at Facebook. Lee gives us all the details on how GraphQL came to be, why it is huge for development, and how to use it successfully in your next application.

Angular Route Guards For Authorization In A Web And Mobile Application

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

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

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

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.

Getting Started With GraphQL Development Using Node.js

I’ve been playing around with GraphQL for a little over a month now, just to see if it is worth all the buzz it has been getting when it comes to modern API development. I must say that the more I use it, the more I’m coming to like it.

I recently wrote a few tutorials around getting started with GraphQL using Golang, but being the polyglot that I am, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to accomplish the same in something else, like Node.js. After having made an attempt, I found that it really isn’t any different as it is the same concept, just a different language.

We’re going to see how to get started with developing a web application with Node.js that can be queried with GraphQL rather than the traditional RESTful API endpoint approach.