Jamstack: Azure Serverless Functions App With React

Jamstack: Azure Serverless Function App With React

Matt McCandless Architecture, Articles, Azure, Development Technologies & Tools, Node.js, React Leave a Comment

A new trend of creating applications is emerging called Jamstack. No, this isnโ€™t slapping together your favorite flavor of jelly (grape is the best) with peanut butter and two pieces of bread. The intent is an architecture that is faster, more secure, and easier to scale. It focuses on pre-rending and decoupling. This way, the solutions created are more reliable and resilient than before.

Pre-rendering comes by the way of using a static website via a CDN for high availability and security. No more serving your React app via web server like weโ€™ve become accustomed to. It reduces cost and complexity by eliminating the regular maintenance and configuration of traditional servers.

Also, the idea of APIs and the ability to move them to things like Serverless functions creates more cost savings, elimination of traditional servers, and use of features only when they are requested. For more information, check out the Serverless website.

End-To-End Testing

Tips Learned From Years of Automated End-to-End Testing

Forrest Goyer Articles, Automation, Programming, Testing 1 Comment

Imagine for a moment that weโ€™re getting ready to publish a new app or feature. Following the principles of Test Driven Development (like we always do), we have created a full suite of unit tests. Weโ€™re never pressed for time, so weโ€™ve also built out full coverage integration and functional tests.

In order to ensure our front-end is behaving as expected, weโ€™ll need to either manually step through the application or just push our commit to the main branch and let our continuous integration pipeline do the building and testing for us. But, if we wrote our end-to-end (E2E) tests without automation in mind, we might find the results lacking in usefulnessโ€ฆ

This post isnโ€™t a discussion on what E2E testing is nor a tutorial on how to get started. For that, resources like Smartbear, CircleCI, and Playwright have already published articles and tutorials that do a great job of covering that ground. In this post, weโ€™ll talk through a few tips Iโ€™ve picked up over 5 years of championing fully automated end-to-end testing.

Adding Autocompletion to Bash Scripts

Adding Autocompletion to Bash Scripts

Jake Everhart Articles, Automation, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

If you have ever mashed the Tab key to finish typing a filename or to show you the available flags to use when running a program, you know that autocompletion can be a great improvement for a command-line tool. But how easy is this to implement for your own executables?

This blog is a guide providing an overview of how autocompletion can be achieved through bash. We will see some of the core concepts in action, focusing on how they interact with each other and the behavior that results.

Application Security

Top Security Mistakes to Avoid in AppDev

Zach Gardner All Industries, Architecture, Articles, Financial, Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, Security, Spring, Supply Chain & Logistics Leave a Comment

Developing custom applications is one of the hardest professional endeavors, and making them secure is even harder. Malicious actors are constantly changing tactics and strategies, which, unfortunately, makes it impossible to completely eliminate any security threat.

There needs to be a balance between delivering features quickly to meet business objectives and mitigating security risks. Thankfully, these two goals are not mutually exclusive. This blog post dives into the top mistakes that can be made while developing custom applications.

These recommendations are different from what would commonly be seen in an OWASP list, and they should be used in addition to whatever security practices and procedures are already in place by an organizationโ€™s infosec department. These recommendations are also written from an application architectโ€™s (rather than an enterprise infrastructure) perspective, so most of them arenโ€™t covered by existing security checklists.