Nickolas Fisher
All Posts by Nickolas Fisher
How to Build an Express Application Using Prisma
Prisma is an ORM (object–relational mapping) tool for Node.js using TypeScript. The software integrates with many of the most popular databases today, including MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, and MongoDB, and emphasizes a human-readable schema with a type-safe database client. Prisma also includes other features such as migrations, seed data, and a virtual database browser. In this project, you will use Prisma to connect your Express application to a database server. You will build a schema...
Build a React App with Firebase Serverless Functions
Firebase is an exciting cloud platform from Google available to businesses today. Firebase connects everything from simple static websites to IoT devices to AI and machine learning platforms. The platform provides various services to facilitate these connections, like storage and authentication. In this tutorial, you will learn about two core Firebase products: Cloud Functions for Firebase and Firebase Hosting. Hosting is for deploying static web applications. Functions are the Firebase serverless platform. You will create...
How to Secure User Data in Azure Cosmos DB
Cosmos DB is a cloud database product from Microsoft that offers scalable and high-performance services. The core product runs on a proprietary NoSQL database that should look familiar to experienced MongoDB developers. Microsoft offers several APIs in addition to the core Cosmos DB API. These include APIs for: SQL MongoDB Gremlin Cassandra The shift to serverless database operations is one of the most obvious advantages of migrating. Cosmos DB can automatically scale your throughput based...
Secure Your .NET 6 Web API
.NET 6 is here and many of us are making preparations to update .NET 5 codebases to .NET 6. As part of this review, today you will learn how to implement the client credentials flow in ASP.NET Core Web API. Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written....
How to Build and Deploy a Serverless React App on Azure
Microsoft’s Azure platform has as many high-tech products as anyone could ever want, including the Azure Static Web Apps service. As the name suggests, the platform hosts static web apps that don’t require a back end. Azure supports React, Angular, Vue, Gatsby, and many more, out of the box. However, you may run into situations where you want some back-end support, such as when you need the backend to run one or two API calls....
Build and Deploy a Node.js App to Heroku
Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that supports many languages. Initially, it supported only Ruby sites but now supports various languages, including JavaScript with Node.js. Heroku also has Docker support so that you can deploy just about anything to it. This tutorial will teach you how to build a small application using the Express framework for Node.js. You will then secure that application using Okta by integrating the Okta OIDC middleware with your...
Create a Secure Serverless Application with FaunaDB
Fauna is a transactional database that is delivered to your application as a secure cloud API. Fauna hosts your database and then allows your application to make calls against it. Typically, to secure such an API, you would establish a relationship between your users and the database in your code. This would mean signing in your users using your authentication provider, in this case, Okta. Then you would need to convert that user to an...
Comparison of Dependency Injection in .NET
Why you should care about dependency injection Dependency injection is a tried and proven design pattern for producing code that is testable, readable, and reusable. This is achieved by creating (or increasing) a separation of concerns, where each class has a dedicated area of responsibility. Dependency injection is just one design pattern used to achieve inversion of control in which the calling code, or client, has no knowledge of the inner workings of the dependency,...
How to Build a Website With Eleventy
11ty is a fantastic tool for quickly creating static sites using a variety of templating languages. 11ty makes designing and developing static sites simple. It supports HTML, Markdown, JavaScript, Nunjucks, Handlebars, and many other template styles, along with built-in support for layouts, pagination, and slugify. 11ty aims to compete against other frameworks such as Jekyll, Hugo, Hexo, Gatsby, and Nuxt. The framework is indeed as simple and powerful as its creators claim. This tutorial will...
Simplify Building Vue Applications with NuxtJS
Nuxt calls itself the intuitive Vue framework. It aims to make a developer-friendly experience while not sacrificing performance or degrading the integrity of your architecture. It has been exciting to see the community and tooling around VueJS grow and evolve — there’s no better time to get started in this ecosystem than now. In this tutorial, you will build a small web application that retrieves some posts from an API and displays them for authenticated...
Secure Your .NET 5 Blazor Server App with MFA
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Introduction to Server Blazor apps Blazor is an exciting new technology from Microsoft that will allow developers to bring C# to clients. Server and...
Build an Electron App with JavaScript and Authentication
Electron is one of the most popular desktop frameworks today. Electron uses HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for its front end and Node.js for its backend. This design enables developers to quickly write and easily maintain cross-platform applications between their desktop and web applications. Since Electron uses Node on the backend, it also has access to the entire npm ecosystem that Node developers have come to rely on. Even though it is built on Node, Electron...
Build a Secure SPA with React Routing
When building an SPA (single page application) with React, routing is one of the fundamental processes a developer must handle. React routing is the process of building routes, determining the content at the route, and securing it under authentication and authorization. There are many tools available to manage and secure your routes in React. The most commonly used one is react-router. However, many developers are not in a situation where they can use the react-router...
Using AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio
Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular cloud computing platforms on the planet. There’s a good chance you will need to work in an AWS environment, which means publishing to one of their web server services like Elastic Beanstalk. The AWS platform is enormous, and this can be an intimidating task for a developer. Luckily, Amazon has released their AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2013-2015 and AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2017-2019, which...
Update App Secrets with Jenkins CI and .NET Core
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Introduction Jenkins is a free and open-source application that makes it easy to create CI/CD pipelines in almost any language or environment. Jenkins features...
A Developer's Guide to Session Management in React
Sessions can be a challenging topic for developers of all skill levels. Many React developers never consider the internals of session management because so much of the work is abstracted away. But, it is important to understand what sessions are, how they work, and how best to manage and manipulate them. There are several different strategies for session management in React. In this article, you will learn the basics about sessions, how to manage them...
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Session Management in Node.js
Session Management is a pretty scary term for a lot of developers. Most of the mechanics of session management are abstracted away from developers, to the point where they don’t properly learn about it until it’s necessary. Usually, this means a late night trying to figure out a vulnerability, a bug, or how to work with a new session management library. Hopefully, I can remove some of the magic behind session management in NodeJs and...
Build a Secure NestJS Back End for Your React Application
NestJS is a node.js framework that boasts the ability to build efficient, reliable, and scalable applications. A NestJS application can serve as the backend for your SPA. In this tutorial, you will use React, one of the most popular javascript front-end libraries available to build your SPA, and then use NestJS for your server. To secure everything, you will level Okta’s simple and powerful single sign-on provider. You will learn how to authenticate a user...
Build Your First NestJS Application
NestJs is a popular Node.js framework that is built with typescript and makes use of object-oriented programming, functional programming, and functional reactive programming. NestJs boasts that it provides a framework for building scalable server-side applications. NestJs integrates nicely with Okta’s single sign-on provider. Okta makes securing a web service, such as the one you will build, quick and easy. Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the...
Easily Consume a GraphQL API from React with Apollo
GraphQL is an incredibly powerful query language for APIs that helps improve performance and extensibility in your APIs. The query language is designed to allow developers to query exactly the data they need. As your API grows in size and scope, current consumers are unaffected by changes since their queries should return the same data. Apollo Client is a state management library for JavaScript. It fits seamlessly into React applications and can handle fetching, caching,...
How to Write Secure SQL Common Table Expressions
Common table expressions are a powerful feature of Microsoft SQL Server. They allow you to store a temporary result and execute a statement afterward using that result set. These can be helpful when trying to accomplish a complicated process that SQL Server isn’t well suited to handle. CTEs allow you to perform difficult operations in two distinct steps that make the challenge easier to solve. In this article, you will learn how to write common...
Quickly Consume a GraphQL API from React
React.js is one of the most popular front-end javascript frameworks today. For most of its life, React has connected to REST APIs to fetch or save data on a server. GraphQL is a query language that aims to replace REST APIs by providing consumers with a clear description of the data in the API. By combining these two technologies, you can quickly connect to an API with your React.js application. There are many packages available...
Build a secure GraphQL API with Node.js
GraphQL is a query language for APIs that provides a clear description of the data and allows clients to specify what data they need, Benefits of using GraphQL include: reduced overhead,improved performance, and reduced risk of potential errors as the API evolves. If the API enhances its functionality, existing clients won’t be affected unless they want to opt in to the new features. Clients can also obtain many resources with a single request. Typical REST...
Build a Next.js Application with TypeScript
Next.js is a React framework that aims to provide the best development experience. It is feature rich, including hybrid static and server rendering, TypeScript support, built-in CSS support, API routers, and much more. TypeScript is an open-source language that is built on JavaScript that allows developers to use types. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use TypeScript with Next.js. Finally, you will secure your application with Okta Single Sign-On and the built-in functionality...
Develop Secure Apps with WebSockets and Node.js
WebSockets is a technology for communicating between the client and the server in a web application, where an open socket creates a persistent connection between the client and the server. This method of communication works outside of the HTTP request/response paradigm that has existed since the earliest days of the internet. Since sockets don’t use HTTP they can eliminate the overhead that comes with HTTP for low latency communications. In this tutorial, you will learn...
Build a Video Chat Service with JavaScript, WebRTC, and Okta
If you are familiar with any sort of real-time communications over the internet such as GoToMeeting, Google Meet, or Discord then chances are you have used WebRTC. WebRTC is an open framework for handling real-time communications. It supports video, voice, or any data between peers. WebRTC is supported by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and many others. In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a web application that allows a user to broadcast their...
Build a Modern API using Fastify and Node.js
Fastify is just as the name implies, fast. Not just in terms of development speed—its low overhead means the server is fast as well. When writing APIs, speed on both sides is paramount. Fastify is a web framework for Node.js that was designed for efficiency. Fastify is fully extensible with hooks, plugins, and decorators. It is schema-based, meaning you can define your response and request objects in your routes and have Fastify do the data...
Build a React App with ANT Design Principles
For years the go-to HTML/CSS framework of choice for developers was Bootstrap. A new contender has appeared in the form of Ant Design. Ant should feel familiar to veteran developers but it’s built on new principles. Their site spends a good amount of effort distinguishing between good and bad design. There is an emphasis on clarity and meaning. Ant Design is heavily based on psychological principles to anticipate—and be customized for—user behavior. Ant Design is...
Migrate Your ASP.NET Framework to ASP.NET Core with Okta
Ah, migration! Let’s say you have an ASP.NET application that has been running fine for years. You have kept up with the various .NET Framework updates and then suddenly you get told that you need to migrate to the latest and greatest, ASP.NET Core using .NET Core. .NET Core is the successor to the .NET Framework we’ve been using for years. It is open-source and supports cross-platform applications. To a veteran .NET developer it should...
Build Awesome APIs with Entity Framework Core
.NET Core version 3.1 just came out as of writing this article. It includes a new version of Entity Framework (EF) Core, the next generation of Microsoft’s tried and tested Object Relational Mapper (ORM). Entity Framework has been used alongside ASP.NET for years and has developed a reputation for being an essential tool in any developer’s toolbox for .NET Framework, and now .NET Core. .NET Core now also includes a built-in dependency injection system and...
Build A Secure Node.js API with KoaJS
Koa is a web framework from the makers of Express. Koa is designed to be middleware-driven and extremely lightweight. It is so lightweight that it comes without any middleware on its own. But not to fear, there are plenty of packages available for basic functionality such as routing, authentication, body parsing, and more. You can also write your own custom middleware— I’ll show you how in this tutorial. Koa prides itself on using async functions...
Quickly Build Node.js Apps with Sails.js
Sails.js is an exciting MVC framework for Node.js. Recently the team released version 1.0 and today you’re going to learn how to use the framework to rapidly build a new website. The hype around Sails.js is real. As a veteran MVC developer, I was impressed with the extensibility, organization, flow, and speed Sails.js provides. The team at Sails. js has done an excellent job of abstracting the MVC portion of the codebase away from the...
How to Make a CRUD App with Entity Framework Core
ASP.NET Core is Microsoft’s latest iteration of its web framework, which boasts many upgrades over the .Net Framework versions of ASP.NET. ASP.NET Core is cross-platform—meaning you can finally deploy your ASP.NET apps on Linux. It’s open-source which is a massive departure from Microsoft’s previous line of thinking. Most of the new framework should be familiar to veteran ASP.NET developers however there are some new tweaks to get used to. One of the most popular tools...
How to Build a Secure AWS Lambda API with Node.js and React
Serverless architecture with AWS Lambdas is quickly becoming a popular option for companies looking to deploy applications without the overhead of maintaining servers. AWS Lambda functions are event-driven and serverless—triggered to process a piece of code and return a result. AWS Lambdas can be written in most common languages today on a variety of platforms including .NET Core, Java, Go and, in the case of this post, Node.js. The example in this post uses Node.js...
Node Microservices: From Zero to Hero
Node is one of the premier frameworks for microservice architecture today. The microservice pattern allows developers to compartmentalize individual components of a larger application infrastructure. Because each component runs independently, you can upgrade or modify components without impacting the larger application. Each component exposes an interface to external consumers who are blind to any internal logic the service does. One of the challenges of working in a microservice environment is the process of one service...
Build A Simple Web App with Node and Postgres
Node.js boasts high performance and scalability for web, mobile, or desktop applications. It is one of the fastest-growing and best-supported javascript frameworks available today, and its microservice patterns has made it a hit for modern enterprise applications. PostgreSQL has also risen in popularity, to compete with MySql. The two technologies partner well as a foundation for modern, microservices-based applications. In this post, we will build a small application that keeps track of a To-Do List...