Containerization with Docker by Example Released

I am pleased to announce that Containerization with Docker by Example, a course I’ve been working on for a while, has been published to the popular Udemy education network.

This course, is the fifth course that I’ve released and the first that hasn’t been on the topic of mobile application development.

Encrypt And Decrypt Data In Node.js With The Crypto Library

As you’ve probably noticed from the previous few articles, I’ve been doing a lot of development around cryptocurrency wallets using Node.js. Up until now, I’ve only been writing about interacting with different currencies. However, I haven’t discussed how to safely store your wallet information.

When it comes to storing anything sensitive, whether it be cryptocurrency secrets or something else, you must do so safely and securely. For example, the data must be encrypted at rest and decrypted when used.

We’re going to see how to encrypt data with a passphrase using Node.js and decrypt it using that same passphrase when necessary.

Create A Cross-Platform Desktop DigiByte DGB Wallet With Angular And Electron

A few weeks back I had written an article titled, Send And Manage DigiByte DGB Coins With Node.js, which had explained how to interact with DigiByte coins via Node.js and the CLI. We saw how to keep track of a wallet, compare against the market value, and send DGB to other wallets. The catch here was that it was all CLI based and not particularly user friendly.

A popular solution towards adding a GUI to a Node.js application comes in the flavor of Electron. With Electron you’re essentially packaging a web application that can interact with native platform APIs.

Since I’m a fan of Angular, we’re going to see how to create a fancy DigiByte wallet using Electron, Node.js, and Angular.

Send And Manage DigiByte DGB Coins With Node.js

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching and watching the blockchain market because it is a very interesting subject matter. Not too long ago I had written an article titled, Create a Cross-Platform Desktop Ripple XRP Wallet with Vue.js and Electron, which focused on the Ripple, the banking network and cryptocurrency.

Ripple isn’t the only cryptocurrency that I’m following. I’m also following DigiByte, which targets digital payments and has the DGB coin. If you’re not familiar with DigiByte, the official wallet forces you to download around 12GB of data to synchronize with the network. It isn’t really appealing to anyone who just wants to sit on some DGB. The good news, is this can be avoided by building your own wallet and client.

We’re going to see how to build a DigiByte DGB client for storing, sending, and managing coins without having to synchronize with the network, using JavaScript and Node.js.

Deploying Native Node.js Dependencies On AWS Lambda

I was recently working on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) project using AWS Lambda and Node.js. However, I was running into an issue where my package dependencies found in my node_modules directory were for the wrong platform once deployed to Lambda. This is not the first time I experienced a problem like this. I knew the issue straight away because I encountered the same thing when trying to use a node_modules directory generated on Mac from a Windows computer.

When uploading a package developed with Node.js to AWS Lambda, the package.json file is not considered. Instead you are uploading a package that contains the node_modules directory and all dependencies. So how do you develop for AWS Lambda from Mac and Windows, but have it work once deployed?

We’re going to see how to use Docker to get our Node.js FaaS project dependencies designed for Amazon’s flavor of Linux.

Convert A Node.js RESTful API To Serverless With OpenWhisk

When it comes to serverless solutions, there are many options available. If you’re a fan of the Microsoft cloud, you could create Azure Functions. If you’ve been keeping up, I wrote a tutorial called, Take a Node.js with Express API Serverless Using AWS Lambda, which used the Amazon Web Services cloud. Another solution is Apache OpenWhisk, a solution available on IBM’s Bluemix cloud.

We’re going to see how to convert the Node.js with Express application that I had written about in a previous article, and make it serverless with OpenWhisk.

Take A Node.js With Express API Serverless Using AWS Lambda

Not too long ago I had written about creating an API with Node.js and Express that accepted image uploads and manipulated the images to be Android compliant before returning them in a ZIP archive. This article was titled, Create an Android Launcher Icon Generator RESTful API with Node.js, and Jimp, and it was a great example of creating APIs that that did most of their work in memory. I even demonstrated how to containerize the application with Docker.

Applications that manipulate media will need to be able to scale, otherwise there is a risk of the application crashing from not enough resources, or too many resources can get expensive. For this reason, it makes perfect sense to take the previous example serverless with Amazon’s Lambda and API Gateway offerings.

We’re going to see how to use API Gateway to accept HTTP requests with binary image data and process that data with Lambda to return various sized Android launcher images packaged in a ZIP archive.