OWASP Dependency Check for Vulnerability Reporting

John Hoestje Java, Security, Technology Snapshot, Tutorial Leave a Comment

TL;DR: Add OWASP Dependency-Check to your build process to get insight into your dependency vulnerabilities.

Recent major data losses and security vulnerabilities in open source frameworks *(and the applications that use them)* have caused the companies that use those frameworks to have elevated concerns regarding vulnerabilities. The elevated awareness is for good reason, too. After all, no one wants to be the next one to lose sensitive data, be the punching bag of others, or be the example of what *not* to do security-wise.

If you happen to be in a group that doesn’t have any open source vulnerability reporting, OWASP Dependency-Check may be your short-term answer to get at least something in place. Adding OWASP Dependency-Check into your build process takes a relatively low effort. Other than not having the technology that stack Dependency-Check can help you with, there isn’t a reason not to at least add Dependency-Check to give a little insight into your open source dependencies.

The following parts will help you get Dependency-Check integrated into your Java project’s build process. The instructions will be adaptable to the other technologies Dependency-Check supports, like Gradle or JavaScript. Dependency-Check is also available as a command line tool for your favorite OS. In this example, I’ll use a Java project with Maven….



Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile App Service

Jeff Hopper .NET, Azure, Mobile, Technology Snapshot, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Earlier this month my friend Ryan introduced us to Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism. In that post, Ryan started a mobile application to display blog posts which he called SimpleBlog.

In this article, I would like to continue that demonstration by adding a back-end server to persist and share these blogs. This will be accomplished using Azure’s Mobile App Service which falls within its free tier services.

Yes, you did read that right: you can spin up an Azure account and have access to try out many of Azure’s features. For instance, the example I am going to walk you through today can be hosted indefinitely without costing you anything, and to that, you could add nine more web, mobile, or API services. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ for more information.

There is no way I am going to be able to cover all the possibilities available in an Azure Mobile App service, much less what Azure has to offer. My intent in this post is to help “whet your appetite” on the possibilities by giving a quick overview of just two great frameworks that play great together: the Microsoft.Azure.Mobile.Client mobile framework tied to an Azure Mobile Apps Service….



Go Forth and AppSync!

Mat Warger Amazon Web Services, AWS, JavaScript, Technology Snapshot Leave a Comment

In a previous post, we discussed the basics of GraphQL and how it can be a great REST API alternative. In this one, we’ll see how AppSync can be more than just a great API alternative — it gives you a soft landing into the world of GraphQL.

Recall our Game API example? Let’s start with the basic type of a game. Follow along and we can implement a simple schema in AppSync together….



Reading and Writing from Excel in Spring Batch

Rik Scarborough Java, Spring, Spring Batch, Technology Snapshot, Tutorial Leave a Comment

We have discussed many different ways to read and write data in Spring Batch. The framework comes with quite an assortment of Readers and Writers that can be used directly or reused in some manner. Most of the time, the requirements consist of reading the data from some type of text file or database.

So what happens when the business we are supporting asks for something out of the ordinary, such as reading an Excel file and outputting the data to another Excel file? Typically the off-the-cuff response would be, “can you convert it to a CSV or other delimited text file?” Or “You know, Excel will read a CSV file just fine.” Sometimes that works, and sometimes the business requirements do not allow that type of flexibility.

Consider this scenario; in these days of Cloud and other online computing, the input file is likely created by a server that the company has no direct access to as far as programming. The file it creates is in one format, Excel. The output of your process has to go before several executives or other business clients and needs to be formatted in a professional looking manner. Adding a manual process to import a CSV and format it diminishes the value of using Spring Batch.

For the sake of the honor of the coding profession, you agree to the requirement to read and write from an Excel file directly. Now, how do you do that?…