The Wonderful Wide World of webpack: Unpacking Awesomeness

Aaron Diffenderfer Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript Leave a Comment

In the past couple of years, webpack has come a long way. It continues to rapidly evolve and revolutionize the way we bundle JavaScript and more. For some of us that have been doing development for more than a few years, seeing an amazing tool like webpack and all of its abilities is mind-blowing. If only it had come into existence a bit sooner…

If you’re like me, you may have stumbled acrossย webpack, hearing about its gazillion configuration options, along with a bunch of plugins, numerous ways to optimize your bundle, and more. So much that it all makes your head spin and you begin to feel overwhelmed as you attempt to make sense of it. Thatโ€™s honestly how my journey began with Webpack.

My first exposure to it…Ejecting the webpack.config.js file from an AngularCLI project just to see what the all the hype was about and to see what I had been missing out on the past few years. After getting past the initial shock of the number of lines of code and the seemingly large structure (how I felt after my first few glances, having to shield my eyes and take a few deep breaths), I started to see many of the benefits. This continued as I read through the webpack documentation, various blogs, and StackOverflow (every developer’s most-accessed site) and as I began trying out a variety of configurations for some actual projects.

As I discovered, webpack can be used with zero config or configured literally in 8,675,309 ways, plus or minus a handful. And there about just as many blogs that cover all of the variations and flavors.

In this post, however, the goal is to highlight some tips & tricks along with features I’ve found to be particularly useful and reasons why you should be using webpack – if you haven’t already started…

OWASP Dependency Check for Vulnerability Reporting

John Hoestje Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Security, Tutorial Leave a Comment

TL;DR:ย 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 doesnโ€™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 isnโ€™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 projectโ€™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, Iโ€™ll use a Java project with Maven….

Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile App Service

Jeff Hopper .NET, Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 3 Comments

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 Azureโ€™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 Azureโ€™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 โ€œwhet your appetiteโ€ 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 API Development, Articles, AWS, Development Technologies & Tools, GraphQL, JavaScript, REST 1 Comment

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

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