Hello, My name is Matt Raible, and I am a developer advocate at Okta. In early 2019, I created OktaDev Schematics to simplify my life when doing Angular demos. But let me step back a bit first. I’ve worked at Okta for over five years; before that, I was an independent consultant for 20 years, mainly doing Java and web development for clients. I’ve learned a lot about OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Okta’s JavaScript SDKs...

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React Native is a mobile app framework from Facebook. It allows you to quickly develop apps using React’s API and deploy them to iOS and Android. It allows you to quickly refresh the apps when you make changes and generally offers a pleasant experience for web developers. React Native for Web is a recent addition to the React Native family. It allows you to run your app in a browser and enjoy the browser’s built-in...

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Microservices have been quite popular in the Java ecosystem ever since Spring Boot and Spring Cloud made them easy to build and deploy. Things have gotten even easier in recent years with the proliferation of new Java frameworks built specifically for microservices: MicroProfile, Micronaut, Quarkus, and Helidon. Not only do these frameworks provide an excellent developer experience, but they also tend to have built-in Docker support. They even work with GraalVM, so you can compile...

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Spring is a long-time friend to enterprise companies throughout the world. When Spring Boot came along in 2014, it greatly simplified configuring a Spring application. This led to widespread adoption and continued investment in related Spring projects. One of my favorite Spring projects is Spring Security. In most cases, it simplifies web security to just a few lines of code. HTTP Basic, JDBC, JWT, OpenID Connect/OAuth 2.0, you name it—Spring Security does it! You might...

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React was designed to make it painless to create interactive UIs. Its state management is efficient and only updates components when your data changes. Component logic is written in JavaScript, meaning you can keep state out of the DOM and create encapsulated components. Developers like CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) apps because they show a lot of the base functionality you need when creating an app. Once you have the basics of CRUD completed...

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You can use OAuth to secure apps, APIs, and devices. OAuth has become increasingly popular, especially as developers are asked to knit together hundreds of apps and thousands of users in enterprise environments. The Java ecosystem is vast, with over 10 million developers worldwide and an abundance of IDEs, build tools, libraries, and frameworks to make them more productive. The infographic below is recommended as a starting point for Java developers. It’s designed to help...

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In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a secure REST API and native image with Helidon. You’ll see how to run a secure, OAuth 2.0-protected, Java REST API that allows JWT authentication. Then, I’ll compare its performance with Micronaut, Quarkus, and Spring Boot. This tutorial is also available as a screencast. Prerequisites: SDKMAN (for Java 17 with GraalVM) HTTPie (a better version of cURL) An Okta Developer Account (or the Okta CLI) The...

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In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a secure REST API and native image with Micronaut. You’ll see how to run a secure, OAuth 2.0-protected, Java REST API that allows JWT authentication. Then, I’ll compare its performance with Quarkus, Spring Boot, and Helidon. This tutorial is also available as a screencast. Prerequisites: SDKMAN (for Java 17 with GraalVM) HTTPie (a better version of cURL) An Okta Developer Account (or the Okta CLI) The...

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In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a secure REST API and native image with Spring Boot. You’ll see how to run a secure, OAuth 2.0-protected, Java REST API that allows JWT authentication. Then, I’ll compare its performance with Micronaut, Quarkus, and Helidon. This tutorial is also available as a screencast. Prerequisites: SDKMAN (for Java 17 with GraalVM) HTTPie (a better version of cURL) An Okta Developer Account (or the Okta CLI) The...

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In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a secure REST API and native image with Quarkus. You’ll see how to run a secure, OAuth 2.0-protected, Java REST API that allows JWT authentication. Then, I’ll compare its performance with Micronaut, Spring Boot, and Helidon. This tutorial is also available as a screencast. Prerequisites: SDKMAN (for Java 17 with GraalVM) HTTPie (a better version of cURL) An Okta Developer Account (or the Okta CLI) The...

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Ionic is a framework for building mobile apps with web technologies that look and act like native apps. Because they’re built with web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS), you can also deploy your Ionic apps as single-page applications. Or, even better, as progressive web apps (PWAs) that work offline. Ionic supports the big three web frameworks: Angular, React, and Vue. Once you’ve written your app, you can deploy it to a simulator or device with...

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Getting something to work is one of the greatest feelings you can have as a developer. Especially when you’ve spent hours, days, or months trying to make it happen. The last mile can be one of the most painful and rewarding experiences, all wrapped into the same day or two. I experienced this recently with Spring Native for JHipster. If I look back, it took a year’s worth of desire, research, and perseverance to make...

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Over the years, I’ve developed a lot of Java applications. I started writing Java code in the late 90s and spent several years doing Java before I tried another server-side language. I was impressed when I first tried building apps in Ruby on Rails, Python, and Node.js - they all started super-fast! Starting fast is cool, but we in the Java community have often asked, does it perform over time? The Java Virtual Machine is...

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AngularJS 1.0 was released in October 2010. At the time, it was considered one of the most revolutionary and popular web frameworks ever to see the light of day. Developers loved it, and created many apps with it. However, as a pioneer in the JS framework space, AngularJS had some growing pains and significant issues. The team went back to the drawing board for a major breaking release with Angular 2. It took two years...

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Project Helidon is a set of Java libraries for writing microservices. It’s an open source, Apache 2.0-licensed, Oracle-sponsored project and contains support for MicroProfile as well as a reactive, functional API. Helidon’s two different styles are known as Helidon MP and SE, respectively. The helidon.io website says: Since Helidon is simply a collection of Java libraries running on a fast Netty core, there is no extra overhead or bloat. Today, I’m going to put this...

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If you search for “Full Stack Java” on the internet, you’ll likely find a lot of recruiting, courses, and jobs. Being a full stack developer can be exciting because you can create the backend and frontend of an app all by yourself. There is business logic and algorithms as well as styling, making things look good, and securing everything. It also pays pretty well. Today, I’m going to show you how you can be a...

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In the fall of 2020, the Spring team released a new experimental Spring Native project that gave Spring developers hope for faster startup times. Spring Native is all about converting your Spring applications to native executables. It leverages GraalVM to make it happen. This announcement was huge because the new kids on the block, Micronaut and Quarkus, produced native executables by default. I was really excited about Spring Native when I first heard about it....

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Java has been able to invoke native programs on an operating system for decades. Invoking native programs is often done using JNI (Java Native Interface) and JNA (Java Native Access). In the last few years, Java has also gained the ability to run JVM apps as native apps. That is, they’re binary executables that have no dependency on the Java runtime. This is huge! Mostly because it gives Java apps the ability to start up...

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When your business or application is successful, it needs to scale. Not just technology-wise, but human-wise. When you’re growing rapidly, it can be difficult to hire developers fast enough. Using a microservices architecture for your apps can allow you to divide up ownership and responsibilities, and scale teams along with your code. Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. Kubernetes traces its lineage directly from Borg, Google’s long-rumored internal container-oriented cluster-management...

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Java has been at the forefront of microservice architectures since they came to prominence a few years ago. It’s a popular language with well-known, high-quality frameworks, like Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Data, and Spring Security. Spring Boot 2.0 introduced a new web framework called Spring WebFlux. Previous versions of Spring Boot only shipped with Spring MVC as an option. WebFlux offers a way for developers to do reactive programming. This means you can write...

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The year is 1995…​ Java is born in May. So is JavaScript (but it’s called Mocha). Microsoft releases Windows 95 in August. JavaScript, as it’s known today, first appeared on this day, December 4th. Wow! It’s so crazy to look back and see so many influential software releases happen in such a short period. Congrats to both JavaScript and Java for doing so well over the last 25 years! Fun fact from the @JavaScriptDaily 👇...

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The Okta CLI is a new tool we’ve created here at Okta. It’s designed to streamline creating new Okta accounts, registering apps, and getting started. Wwwhhaaattt, you might say?! That’s right, it’s super awesome! To show you how easy it is, I created a screencast that shows you how to use it with Angular. To create the same app as the one shown in this video, you’ll need to run okta start angular --branch widget....

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The Okta CLI is a new tool we’ve created here at Okta. It’s designed to streamline the process of creating new Okta accounts, registering apps, and getting started. Wwwhhaaattt, you might say?! That’s right, it’s super awesome! To show you how much fun it is, I created a screencast that shows you how to use it. This video puts your settings in src/main/resources/application.properties. We’ve since changed the default behavior to use spring-dotenv. For those that...

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Building a web application involves a lot of moving pieces. You have a backend server handling API calls, a frontend application running business logic, and you need to somehow make sure both are in sync and secure. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to use Vaadin Fusion, Spring Boot, and Okta to create a full-stack web application with authentication. Specifically, you’ll learn how to: Create a Spring Boot-based Vaadin Fusion app Secure server endpoints...

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If you’re a Java developer like me, you like to crank out code and get shit done. I like many things about IntelliJ IDEA, but I thought it’d be fun to write about the ones that make me most productive. First, a bit of my development history. When I first started doing Java development in the late 90s, I used HomeSite as my editor. HomeSite was an HTML editor initially developed by Nick Bradbury. I...

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Apple announced a Sign in with Apple service at its WWDC developer conference in June 2019. If you’re familiar with social login with Google or Facebook, it’s very similar. Most of these identity services use OAuth and OpenID Connect (OIDC), and Apple’s implementation is similar. Today I’d like to show you how to develop a mobile application with Ionic, add OIDC authentication, retrieve the user’s information, and add social login (aka federated identity) with Apple...

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Micronaut is a new framework for developing JVM applications, including APIs and microservices. It uses ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to compute the information that your application needs before runtime, removing the need for reflection. The result is a significant decrease in runtime overhead and startup time, and a substantial increase in application throughput. Micronaut is a direct competitor to Spring Boot from the folks that invented Grails. Its design and runtime efficiency make it ideal for...

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You’ve built a React app, but now you need to deploy it. What do you do? First, it’s probably best to choose a cloud provider as they’re typically low-cost and easy to deploy to. Most cloud providers offer a way to deploy a static site. Heroku supports static sites, easily deploys apps with Git, and provides a CLI that developers love. A built React app is just JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. They’re static files that...

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Building modern apps with Angular and Spring Boot is a common practice these days. In fact, if I use Google’s Keyword Planner to look up popular search terms, it’s one of the most popular combinations. The results in the list below are average monthly searches and not limited by location. This tutorial is the fourth and final in a series on Angular and Spring Boot in 2020. In the first one, I showed how to...

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Node.js just celebrated its 11th birthday on May 27! With the state of things nows, it’s pretty crazy to think back to the massive JavaScript Renaissance boost of 2009. In case you’re not aware, the JavaScript Renaissance began in around 2004 with Ajax, increased exponentially with jQuery in the mid-2000s, and then really took off with Node.js and a plethora of early JavaScript web frameworks; including Backbone.js, Ember.js, and AngularJS. Today, I’d like to show...

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One of the more popular combinations of frontend and backend frameworks is Angular + Spring Boot. I’ve written several tutorials about how to combine the two—from keeping them as separate apps to combining them into a single artifact. But, what about deployment? Developers ask me from time-to-time, "What’s the best way to do Angular deployment?" In this tutorial, I’ll show you several options. I’ll start by showing you how to deploy a Spring Boot app...

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Mobile development offers a lot of options. To develop native apps, you can use Java or Kotlin on Android. On iOS, you can use Objective C or Swift. There are other options, too. You can build hybrid mobile apps and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Hybrid mobile apps are those created with web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) that look like native apps. PWAs have the ability to work offline and act like mobile apps too....

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If you attend a lot of Java ecosystem conferences, you’ll think that everyone uses microservices. It’s a trendy topic, and developers everywhere are interested in learning about them. For a good reason too! Microservice architectures are a technique for delivering code faster. Chris Richardson is a friend and expert on microservices. He suggests a helpful guideline in a recent blog post: Why microservices? IF you are developing a large/complex application AND you need to deliver...

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I’ve been a longtime fan of CSS frameworks since 2005. I led an open-source project called AppFuse at the time and wanted a way to provide themes for our users. We used Mike Stenhouse’s CSS Framework and held a design content to gather some themes we liked for our users. A couple of other CSS frameworks came along in the next few years, namely Blueprint in 2007 and Compass in 2008. However, no CSS frameworks...

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Gatsby is a tool for creating static websites with React. It allows you to pull your data from virtually anywhere: content management systems (CMSs), Markdown files, APIs, and databases. Gatsby leverages GraphQL and webpack to combine your data and React code to generate static files for your website. JAM - JavaScript, APIs, and Markup - apps are delivered by pre-rendering files and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement to manage or run...

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Angular is a web framework for building mobile and desktop applications. Its first version, AngularJS, was one of the first JavaScript MVC frameworks to dominate the web landscape. Developers loved it, and it rose to popularity in the early 2010s. AngularJS 1.0 was released on June 14, 2014. Angular 9 was recently released, giving Angular quite a successful run in the land of web frameworks. Spring Boot is one of the most popular frameworks for...

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Hello, fellow developers. Have you ever been bitten by transitive dependencies changing in minor releases? I have. Semantic versioning is supposed to prevent this, and sure, semantic versioning is a great idea at its core, but when its guidance is not followed it sucks. People release minor versions without backward compatibility all-the-time. TL;DR? Semantic versioning sucks because humans get involved. In the early days, I don’t recall having much of a problem with dependencies and...

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React Native is a mobile app development framework that allows you to use React to build native iOS and Android mobile apps. Instead of using a web view and rendering HTML and JavaScript, it converts React components to native platform components. This means you can use React Native in your existing Android and iOS projects, or you can create a whole new app from scratch. In this post, I’ll show you how to add a...

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On September 19, 2019, we held our first Okta Developer office hours. Our goal was to host a live Q&A with developers that use Okta. Over 150 developers attended! We streamed the session live on YouTube, so you can watch it below if you like. We received around 60 questions during our live-stream and did not get a chance to answer them all. After close examination, we determined that many questions overlapped and ended up...

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So you wanna go full reactive, eh? Great! Reactive programming is an increasingly popular way to make your applications more efficient. Instead of making a call to a resource and waiting on a response, reactive applications asynchronously receive a response. This allows them to free up processing power, only perform processing when necessary, and scale more effectively than other systems. The Java ecosystem has its fair share of reactive frameworks, including Play Framework, Ratpack, Vert.x,...

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Microservices have become a popular and effective design for scaling development teams in large companies. A microservices architecture enables you to build and deploy services independently, providing developers autonomy, enthusiasm, and a passion for their work. These benefits are realized because they feel a sense of control over their own destiny. Allow me to demonstrate with a story about my time at LinkedIn. In early 2008, they asked me to do an analysis of Ruby...

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Java turned 24 years old on May 23, 2019. That’s pretty old for a programming language. The fact that it’s still widely used and runs many of the world’s largest organizations is nothing short of incredible. But it has a unique impression problem among languages in that it means two very distinct things: Java the language and Java the runtime. Many developers, of course, think Java is old and therefore shouldn’t be used. And yet...

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I’m a big fan of Ionic. I started using it several years ago when it was based on AngularJS. As a developer, I really liked it because I knew Angular. I found didn’t have to learn much more to be a productive developer with Ionic. What is Ionic? I’m glad you asked! Ionic is an open source project that allows you to build mobile apps using web tech. Technically, this is called a "hybrid" app...

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Ionic allows you to develop PWAs and hybrid mobile apps. PWAs are web applications that run in a browser and allow for offline capabilities via service workers. They can be installed on desktops and mobile devices, just like you install apps on your smartphone. Hybrid mobile apps are like native mobile apps, except they’re built using web technologies. Ionic 2 was based on AngularJS. Ionic 3 was based on Angular. Ionic 4 allows you to...

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Developing a microservice architecture with Java and Spring Boot is quite popular these days. It’s definitely one of the most popular combinations in the Java ecosystem. If you need any proof, just look at all of the similar frameworks that have cropped up in the last few years: MicroProfile, Micronaut, and Quarkus, just to name a few. Spring Boot provided a much-needed spark to the Spring ecosystem when it was first released in 2014. Instead...

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Java is a great language to use when developing a microservice architecture. In fact, some of the biggest names in our industry use it. Have you ever heard of Netflix, Amazon, or Google? What about eBay, Twitter, and LinkedIn? Yes, major companies handling incredible traffic are doing it with Java. Implementing a microservices architecture in Java isn’t for everyone. For that matter, implementing microservices, in general, isn’t often needed. Most companies do it to scale...

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Schematics is a tool from the Angular team that allows you to manipulate projects with code. You can create files, update existing files, and add dependencies to any project that has a package.json file. That’s right, Schematics aren’t only for Angular projects! In this post, I’ll show you how to use Schematics to modify a project created with Vue CLI. Why Vue? Because it’s fast and efficient. Its default bundle size is smaller than Angular...

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If you’ve been a Java developer for more than 15 years, you probably remember when there were a plethora of Java web frameworks. It started with Struts and WebWork. Then Tapestry, Wicket, and JSF came along and championed the idea of component-based frameworks. Spring MVC was released in 2004 (in the same month as Flex 1.0 and JSF 1.0) and became the de-facto standard in Java web frameworks over the next six years. Then along...

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Being a developer advocate can be a difficult job. Developer advocates are often responsible for writing blog posts, speaking at conferences, and helping developers use their company’s products. If there’s developer friction, it’s an advocate’s job to help educate their company about how to reduce it. Advocates are often recognized leaders in their communities, so they have to keep up that persona as well. Writing, traveling, speaking, educating, and helping can be exhausting. The first...

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Using unit and integration tests to verify your code quality is an excellent way to show you care about your code. I recently did a bunch of work in the popular JHipster open source project to upgrade it to use the latest release of Spring Security. Spring Security 5.1+ adds OAuth 2.0 and OIDC as first-class citizens that you can configure with its elegant DSL (a.k.a. cool method chaining, a.k.a. the builder pattern). I’ve been...

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There’s a lot going on in the Java ecosystem lately. Now that major Java versions are released every six months, it can be difficult to keep up. Personally, I develop the majority of my Java applications using Spring Boot. Because of this, I was stuck on Java 8 until Spring Boot 2.1 was released last October. Spring Boot 2.1 added Java 11 support, along with performance improvements, a new metrics implementation, new actuator endpoints, and...

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Developers all have their favorite GitHub repositories. They have software projects that they love and watch closely for the latest changes. In this tutorial, you’ll create a simple CRUD application to save and to display your favorite GitHub open source projects. You will use Angular to implement the user interface features and Python for the backend. These days it is not uncommon to have an API that is responsible not only for persisting data to...

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Building a microservices architecture is possible with minimal code if you use Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Spring Cloud Config. Package everything up in Docker containers and you can run everything using Docker Compose. If you’re communicating between services, you can ensure your services are somewhat secure by not exposing their ports in your docker-compose.yml file. But what happens if someone accidentally exposes the ports of your microservice apps? Will they still be secure or...

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Developers love to automate things. It’s what we do for a living for the most part. We create programs that take the tediousness out of tasks. I do a lot of presentations and live demos. Over the past year, I’ve noticed that some of my demos have too many steps to remember. I’ve written them down in scripts, but I’ve recently learned it’s much cooler to automate them with tools powered by Schematics! Schematics is...

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Hello, Developers! Have you ever been to the wonderful conference known as Devnexus? I attended for the first time two years ago and had a blast! It’s well organized, affordable, and has a diverse and fun crowd. This year, Okta is sponsoring Devnexus and we have a number of speakers sharing their wisdom. I thought it’d be fun to write a blog post that highlights my team members and what they’ll be talking about. If...

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What are i18n and l10n? Internationalization (i18n) is the process of making your application capable of rendering its text in multiple languages. Localization (l10n) means your application has been coded in such a way that it meets language, cultural, or other requirements of a particular locale. These requirements can include formats for date, time, and currency, as well as symbols, icons, and colors, among many other things. i18n enables l10n. Why is i18n and l10n...

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When I first started to learn Angular (it was called Angular 2 at the time), I was appalled by the number of files you needed to create to get a basic "Hello, World" example working. As Angular matured, a lot of this pain went away thanks to Angular CLI. Angular CLI is a command-line tool that generates a basic Angular project for you. In its 7.0 release, it started asking you questions about your application....

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I’ve been a professional developer advocate for a little over two years. I started out at Stormpath, and six months later, I leapt at the opportunity to do the same thing at Okta. I say "professional" because even though I’ve been a technical speaker since 2004, I never got paid for it. During my first year (2017) at Okta, I traveled and spoke a lot. A lot being more than I’d ever traveled and spoken...

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There has been a lot of confusion lately about Java and its available SDKs (Software Development Kits). You might’ve heard the Java SDK called the JDK. They’re one and the same. Java SE (Standard Edition) is a specification that’s governed by the JCP (Java Community Process). This process decides what goes into (or gets removed from the JDK). Anyone can implement the Java specification. If they pass the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit), they’re considered a...

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I started programming in Java way back in 1999. I had just started a job as the director of web development at a small startup called eDeploy.com. I wrote a lot of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a SaaS product that helped companies install network equipment. The backend for our app was written in Java and we deployed to iPlanet Application Server. At our height, we trusted Loudcloud to run our software. I experienced a...

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Angular 7 was released earlier this quarter and I’m pumped about a few of its features. If you’ve been following Angular since Angular 2, you know that upgrading can sometimes be a pain. There was no Angular 3, but upgrading to Angular 4 wasn’t too bad, aside from a bunch of changes in Angular’s testing infrastructure. Angular 4 to Angular 5 was painless, and 5 to 6 only required changes to classes that used RxJS....

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Vue is a web framework that’s gotten a lot of attention lately because it’s lean and mean. Its baseline framework cost is around 40K and is known as a minimalistic web framework. With all of the recent attention on web performance and mobile-first, mobile-fast, it’s no surprise that Vue has become more and more popular. If you spent the time to learn AngularJS back in the day, chances are you’ll find an old friend in...

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Spring Boot 2.1 was recently released, eight months after the huge launch of Spring Boot 2.0. The reason I’m most excited about Spring Boot 2.1 to me is its improved performance and OpenID Connect (OIDC) support from Spring Security 5.1. The combination of Spring Boot and Spring Security has provided excellent OAuth 2.0 support for years, and making OIDC a first-class citizen simplifies its configuration quite a bit. For those that aren’t aware, OIDC is...

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I ❤️ Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite holidays. I love it because it’s a time of reflection and gratitude. As an open source developer, I have a lot to be thankful for. Many of the tools I use are created by developers from around the world, and I get to use them for free! I’m also very thankful for my awesome job at @oktadev. I get to write example apps with open source software,...

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React Native is a framework for building mobile applications with React. React allows you to use a declarative style of programming to describe how your UI should look. It uses embedded HTML (called JSX) to render buttons, lists, scrollable views, and many other components. I’m a seasoned Java and JavaScript developer that loves Spring and TypeScript. Some might call me a Java hipster because I like JavaScript. In this post, I’m going to show you...

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Spring WebFlux can be used to create a REST API with streaming data. Spring WebFlux can also be integrated with WebSockets to provide notifications that clients can listen to. Combining the two is a powerful way to provide real-time data streaming to JavaScript or mobile clients. Add React to the mix and you have an excellent foundation for a full-stack reactive architecture. React is a UI toolkit (similar to GWT) that lets you build components...

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Spring Boot 2.0 was a long-awaited release from the good folks at Pivotal. One of its new features is reactive web programming support with Spring WebFlux. Spring WebFlux is a web framework that’s built on top of Project Reactor, to give you asynchronous I/O, and allow your application to perform better. If you’re familiar with Spring MVC and building REST APIs, you’ll enjoy Spring WebFlux. There’s just a few basic concepts that are different. Once...

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Reactive programming allows you to build systems that are resilient to high load. Handling lots of traffic isn’t a problem because the server is non-blocking and doesn’t block client processes to wait for responses. The client cannot directly observe, or synchronize with, the execution that occurs on the server. When an API is struggling to handle requests, it should respond in a sensible way. It shouldn’t fail to work or drop messages in an uncontrolled...

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Electron is a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It was created for GitHub’s Atom editor and has achieved widespread adoption since. Electron powers several apps that I use on a daily basis: Slack, Kitematic, and Visual Studio Code to name a few. Electron 2.0 was released in early May 2018, along with changes to the project to adhere to strict semantic versioning. This is good news...

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Java EE allows you to build Java REST APIs quickly and easily with JAX-RS and JPA. Java EE is an umbrella standards specification that describes a number of Java technologies, including EJB, JPA, JAX-RS, and many others. It was originally designed to allow portability between Java application servers, and flourished in the early 2000s. Back then, application servers were all the rage and provided by many well-known companies such as IBM, BEA, and Sun. JBoss...

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Technology moves fast these days. It can be challenging to keep up with the latest trends as well as new releases of your favorite projects. I’m here to help! Spring Boot and Angular are two of my favorite projects, so I figured I’d write y’all a guide to show you how to build and secure a basic app using their latest and greatest releases. In Spring Boot, the most significant change in 2.0 is its...

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Spring Boot has dramatically simplified the development of Spring applications. Its autoconfiguration and starter dependencies reduce the amount of code and configuration you need to begin an app. If you were used to Spring and lots of XML back in the day, Spring Boot is a breath of fresh air. Spring Boot was first released in 2014, and a lot has changed since then. Much like code quality and testing, security has become a concern...

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A lot has happened in the last five years of software development. What it means to build, deploy, and orchestrate software has changed drastically. There’s been a move from hosting software on-premise to public cloud and shift from virtual machines (VMs) to containers. Containers are cheaper to run than VMs because they require fewer resources and run as single processes. Moving to containers has reduced costs, but created the problem of how to run containers...

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I think you’ll like the story I’m about to tell you. I’m going to show you how to build a GraphQL API with Vesper framework, TypeORM, and MySQL. These are Node frameworks, and I’ll use TypeScript for the language. For the client, I’ll use React, reactstrap, and Apollo Client to talk to the API. Once you have this environment working, and you add secure user authentication, I believe you’ll love the experience! Why focus on...

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At its core, React is just a UI toolkit, ala GWT, but it has a very healthy ecosystem around it that provides everything you need to build a kick-ass progressive web app (PWA). PWAs are cool because if they’re done right, they can offer a native-like experience for your users, allowing them to install your app, and use it when it’s offline. But, “why React?” is what you’re probably asking yourself right now, right? Well,...

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I’ve written several posts on this blog that show you how to develop an Angular SPA (single-page application) that talks to a Spring Boot API. In almost all of them, I’ve used OAuth 2.0’s implicit flow and built, tested, and deployed them as separate applications. IMHO, this is the way many applications (outside of the Java world) are built and deployed. What if you could combine the two applications for production, and still get all...

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Spring Boot has experienced massive adoption over the last several years. For Spring users, it offers a breath of fresh air, where they don’t have to worry about how things are configured if they’re comfortable with defaults. The Spring Boot ecosystem is filled with a wealth of what they call starters. Starters are bundles of dependencies that autoconfigure themselves to work as a developer might expect. Spring Boot allows you to create standalone web apps,...

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Angular 6 is now available and it’s not a drop-in replacement for Angular 5. If you’ve been developing with Angular since Angular 2, you likely remember that it wasn’t too difficult to upgrade to Angular 4 or Angular 5. In most projects, you could change the version numbers in your package.json and you were on your way. In fact, the most significant change I remember in the last couple of years was the introduction of...

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Writing apps with Spring Boot and Ionic (which is built on Angular) can be fun because both frameworks offer a good developer experience (DX). You change a file, save it, and the app automatically reloads with your changes. This feature is often called hot-reload and it’s a blissful way to develop. It’s so nice, it can cause you to forget about automating your tests. I’ll admit, writing tests is difficult to do. Writing the test...

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“Productivity is all about efficiency and planning.” – Mahdi Yusuf, Iterate 2018 Like most developers, I love getting shit done. My best days are when I feel like I’ve been massively productive. When the Stormpath team joined Okta in February 2018, it was a tough transition at first. I’d started to get into the flow of writing blog posts about Stormpath’s SDKs and had a bunch queued up. But Okta didn’t have SDKs like Stormpath,...

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With Okta and OpenID Connect (OIDC) you can easily integrate authentication into a React Native application and never have to build it yourself again. OIDC allows you to authenticate directly against the Okta API, and this article shows you how to do just that in a React Native application. Today you’ll see how to log a user into your React Native application using an OIDC redirect via the AppAuth library. React Native is a pretty...

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Developers love sample applications. It’s one thing to see the steps to create an application or feature; but when someone provides a working app you can just build and run it’s simply fantastic. Open source is near and dear to many developers today. Many of the frameworks we use to build applications are open source. It’s a great way to develop widely-used software and get contributions from your users. Okta’s Developer Experience (DevEx) team believes...

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JHipster is a development platform to generate, develop, and deploy Spring Boot + Angular web applications and Spring microservices. It supports using many types of authentication: JWT, session-based, and OAuth 2.0. In its 5.0 release, it added React as a UI option. In addition to having two popular UI frameworks, JHipster also has modules that support generating mobile applications. If you like Ionic, which currently leverages Angular, you can use Ionic for JHipster. If you’re...

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Building a microservices architecture with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud can allow your team to scale and develop software faster. It can add resilience and elasticity to your architecture that will enable it to fail gracefully and scale infinitely. All this is great, but you need continuous deployment and excellent security to ensure your system stays up-to-date, healthy, and safe for years to come. With Spring Security and its OAuth 2.0 support, you have everything...

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We 💙 Ionic, JHipster, and Java here at Okta. Ionic is a framework for building native mobile apps using web technologies. Technically, this is called a “hybrid” app because it’s not using native SDKs. Hybrid mobile apps are distributed just like native apps: they can be installed on mobile devices, and they’re listed in app stores. As an end user, there’s a good chance you can’t tell the difference between a hybrid mobile app and...

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Local Storage is a JavaScript API technically known as localStorage that arrived with HTML5. It allows you to store information on a user’s browser quickly and easily. There are many debates on the web as to whether it’s better than cookies. Some say it’s faster (because it doesn’t send data with every request like cookies do) and more secure. Whether it’s more secure or not is debatable, especially when compared with secure cookies that have...

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Cryptocurrencies are all the rage. Over the last year, the value of Bitcoin alone has risen 1,603%, driving more and more people to wonder if they’re missing out on the “next big thing.” Because of the massive influx of money into cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Ripple — blockchain technology (which is the foundation of all cryptocurrency) has become an area of intense technical study. At its core, blockchain technology does nothing more than...

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Spring Security is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. It is the de-facto standard for securing Spring-based applications. I first encountered Spring Security when it was called Acegi Security in 2005. I had implemented standard Java EE in my open source project, AppFuse. Acegi Security offered a lot more, including remember me and password encryption as standard features. I had managed to get “remember me” working with Java EE, but it wasn’t...

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React has been getting a lot of positive press in the last couple years, making it an appealing frontend option for Java developers! Once you learn how it works, it makes a lot of sense and can be fun to develop with. Not only that, but it’s wicked fast! If you’ve been following me, or if you’ve read this blog for a bit, you might remember my Bootiful Development with Spring Boot and Angular tutorial....

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Technology moves fast these days. It can be challenging to keep up with the latest trends as well as new releases of your favorite projects. I’m here to help! Spring Boot and Angular are two of my favorite projects, so I figured I’d write y’all a guide to show you how to build and secure a basic app using their latest and greatest releases. In Spring Boot, the most significant change in 2.0 is its...

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I’ve fallen in love with Play Framework in the past, but then found a more attractive framework in Spring Boot. I fell in love partly because Play was new and sexy at the time, but also because it’s “live reloading” of Java code was a killer feature I’d been looking for. When it added support for Scala in v2.0, I was very excited to learn Scala and discover the power of functional programming. Part of...

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Single sign-on (SSO) is a feature that most developers don’t care about when building one-off applications for clients or themselves. However, when developing apps for their company, which will be used by employees of their business, they often need to hook into an existing identity provider. It might be Active Directory (AD), LDAP, or a myriad of other systems. Okta provides SSO for many companies around the world and allows them to configure AD and...

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Last month, I wrote about NoSQL Options for Java Developers. I analyzed the data available from a variety of sources (Indeed jobs, GitHub stars, Stack Overflow tags) to pick the top five options: MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, Neo4j, and PostgreSQL. After writing this article, I shared it with a few experts I know in the Java and NoSQL communities and asked them the following questions: Do you agree with my choices of the top 5 NoSQL...

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A “hipster” is defined as a person who is exceptionally aware of or interested in the latest trends and tastes. JHipster is an open source project whose name stands for “Java Hipster.” If you’re using JHipster, chances are you’re aware of and using the latest trends and techniques in Java development. Trendy things in server-side Java development include microservices, embedded app servers, deployment with containers, auto-configuration, and monitoring. JHipster supports all of these trends, embracing...

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I love my job as a developer advocate at Okta. I get to learn a lot, write interesting blog posts and create example apps with cool technologies like Kotlin, TypeScript, Spring Boot, and Angular, which I’m about to demo. When it comes to writing Hello World apps with authentication, I can whip one out in a few minutes. That isn’t because I’m a particularly good programmer, it’s because the languages, frameworks, tools, and platforms available...

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I’ll happily admit that like many of you, I’m a lazy developer. I tend to look for solutions someone else has already built before I try to build them myself. In the “old days” of the early 2000s, I used to spend a lot more time coding solutions myself. But today many solutions to coding problems are just a keyword search away. In that spirit, I approached this tutorial using keywords – looking for existing...

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The Java community is one I know and love, so even though a NoSQL database is rarely tied to a language I’m writing this article for you, Java developers around the world. In this article, I’ll show you several options for NoSQL databases. After exploring all the options, I’ll narrow the choices down to the top five based on Indeed Jobs, GitHub stars, and Stack Overflow tags. Then I’ll let you know if they’re supported...

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With Okta and OpenID Connect (OIDC) you can easily integrate authentication into an Ionic application, and never have to build it yourself again. OIDC allows you to authenticate directly against the Okta API, and this article shows you how to do just that in an Ionic application. I’ll demo how to log in with OIDC redirect, using Okta’s Auth SDK as well as how to use OAuth with Cordova’s in-app browser; user registration is omitted...

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Okta is investing heavily into making developers successful by creating great developer experiences through updated SDKs and integrations as well as new pricing and packaging. These updates are intended to give developers everything they need to build modern, secure applications. But equally important is how Okta speaks to developers. How we engage with the community and build our reputation with a wide range of developers. At the heart of that effort, is our Developer Relations...

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You’ve built a microservices architecture with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. You’re happy with the results, and you like how it adds resiliency to your application. You’re also pleased with how it scales and how different teams can deploy microservices independently. But what about security? Are you using Spring Security to lock everything down? Are your microservices locked down too, or are they just behind the firewall? This tutorial shows you how you can use...

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Progressive Web Apps, aka PWAs, are the best way for developers to make their webapps load faster and more performant. In a nutshell, PWAs are websites that use recent web standards to allow for installation on a user’s computer or device, and deliver an app-like experience to those users. Twitter recently launched mobile.twitter.com as a PWA built with React and Node.js. They’ve had a good experience with PWAs, showing that the technology is finally ready...

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There’s a lot of confusion around what OAuth actually is. Some people think OAuth is a login flow (like when you sign into an application with Google Login), and some people think of OAuth as a “security thing”, and don’t really know much more than that. I’m going to show you what OAuth is, explain how it works, and hopefully leave you with a sense of how and where OAuth can benefit your application. What...

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JHipster is one of those open-source projects you stumble upon and immediately think, “Of course!” It combines three very successful frameworks in web development: Bootstrap, Angular, and Spring Boot. Bootstrap was one of the first dominant web-component frameworks. Its largest appeal was that it only required a bit of HTML and it worked! Bootstrap showed many in the Java community how to develop components for the web. It leveled the playing field in HTML/CSS development,...

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Adopting a microservice architecture provides unique opportunities to add failover and resiliency to your systems, so your components can handle load spikes and errors gracefully. Microservices make change less expensive too. It can also be a good idea when you have a large team working on a single product. Your project can likely be broken up into components that can function independently of one another. Once components can function independently, they can be built, tested,...

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You’re developing a Progressive Web Application (PWA), and your service worker and web app manifest are working swimmingly. You’ve even taken the time to deploy it to a server with HTTPS, and you’re feeling pretty good about things. But wait, you don’t have any way of knowing who your users are! Don’t you want to provide them with an opportunity to authenticate and tell you who they are? Once you know who they are, you...

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You already know that building APIs with Spring Boot is incredibly easy. But, your API isn’t complete without a UI, right? Well, building UIs with Ionic is pretty easy too, especially if you know Angular! Ionic is an open source framework designed to help you build mobile applications with web technologies. It started out as a framework based on AngularJS. Ionic 3.0 was recently released, with support for Angular 4, TypeScript 2.2, and lazy loading....

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An October 2016 DoubleClick report found 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load. That same report said the average mobile sites load in 19 seconds. According to Alex Russell in his recent talk on the state of mobile development, one of the biggest problems in mobile today is that developers use powerful laptops and desktops to develop their mobile applications, rather than using a $200 device...

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To simplify development and deployment, you want everything in the same artifact, so you put your Angular app “inside” your Spring Boot app, right? But what if you could create your Angular app as a standalone app and make cross-origin requests to your API? Hey guess what, you can do both! I believe that most frontend developers are used to having their apps standalone and making cross-origin requests to APIs. The beauty of having a...

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Angular (formerly called Angular 2.0) is quickly becoming one of the most powerful ways to build a modern single-page app. A core strength is Angular’s focus on building reusable components, which help you decouple the various concerns in your application. Take authentication, for example: it can be painful to build, but once you wrap it in a component, the authentication logic can be reused throughout your application. The Angular CLI makes it easy to scaffold...

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AngularJS reigned as king of JavaScript MVC frameworks for several years. However, when the Angular team announced they would not provide backwards compatibility for their next version, there was a bit of a stir in its community, giving opportunities for frameworks like React and Vue.js to flourish. Fast forward a few years and both Angular 2 and Angular 4 have been released. Many developers are trying its TypeScript and finding the experience a pleasant one....

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If you’re building a Spring Boot application, you’ll eventually need to add user authentication. You can do this with OAuth 2.0 (henceforth: OAuth). OAuth is a standard that applications can use to provide client applications with “secure delegated access”. It works over HTTP and authorizes devices, APIs, servers, and applications with access tokens rather than credentials. Very simply, OAuth is a protocol that supports authorization workflows. It gives you a way to ensure that a...

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