How To Web Technologies

Secrets in Google App Engine

April 27, 2019 – 3:56 pm

Google App Engine makes it easy to deploy NodeJS applications. The GAE Standard Environment and SDK support NodeJS out of the box. This makes Google App Engine a great choice ahead of competitors such as Heroku, AWS or Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately though, there’s no support for managing secrets in Google App Engine. When I deployed Dog n Bone to GAE, I found this single shortcoming the main source of complexity.

There are however some workarounds. None of them is particularly nice though.

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Web Technologies

Detecting Twilio API login failures

February 24, 2019 – 3:55 pm

When I built out Dog n Bone – a browser phone powered by Twilio, I found that behavior on providing an incorrect accountSid / authToken was not quite what I expected. This post details how I detected Twilio API login failures in Dog n Bone.

Twilio uses ClientCapability tokens to grant access to API features. The back end obtains a ClientCapability object using a Twilio accountSid and authToken. It sets scopes on the ClientCapability to grant only necessary permissions on that account. API requests in the front end authenticate using the JWT created from the CapabilityToken. This mechanism allows the front end to authenticate to the API without exposing the Twilio accountSid / authToken.

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Docker How To

SSH into a Docker Container

November 30, 2018 – 5:03 pm

Just sometimes, it’s useful to SSH into a Docker Container. While docker exec or docker attach are usually sufficient to run commands in a container, sometimes you specifically need SSH. For example, to connect directly from a remote machine or when an application needs to run commands on your container. Most Docker images don’t come with the SSHd service installed so it is not possible to SSH to them. This post demonstrates how to install and run the SSHd service to an existing image so that you can connect to it.

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How To Testing

Unit test time based logic

October 23, 2018 – 7:57 pm

A standard unit testing problem is how to unit test code that has a dependency on dates or times. Consider a method that returns a greeting according to the time of day. If we were to call this method from a test fixture (say JUnit), it would return different values depending on when the test was run. This is not ideal. Unit tests should pass or fail consistently.

Here’s a simple solution for testing time based code.

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Testing Web Technologies

Test First React part 2: API calls and Mocks

September 23, 2018 – 7:55 pm

This article demonstrates some more advanced test first React practices. Specifically, API calls and mocks.

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Testing Web Technologies

Test First React part 1: setup and first tests

August 25, 2018 – 10:33 am

React is a great choice for writing test first client side Javascript. The test ecosystem is mature enough to enable test first development of complex components. This article shows how to build a React component test first and introduces supporting test libraries Jest and Enzyme. In the next article we’ll look at more advanced testing including API testing and module mocking.

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How To Testing

Test log4j2 with JUnit using a custom appender

April 29, 2018 – 6:57 pm

In previous articles, I’ve described how to test System.out with JUnit and how to test log4j with JUnit. This article describes how to test log4j2 logging with JUnit. This largely follows the same technique as testing log4j logging but using the the newer log4j2 APIs. Differences between log4j and log4j2 log4j2 follows a similar design read more »

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How To Testing

Test log4j with JUnit using a custom appender

January 15, 2018 – 8:21 pm

Following a recent article on how to Test System.out with JUnit, here’s a follow up on how to test log4J with JUnit. This article describes a technique to test log4J output in a JUnit test by adding a custom appender. This allows us to verify that log4j output contains expected Strings.

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How To

Validate JSPs at build time

November 13, 2017 – 7:44 pm

JSPs compile to Java code at run time. This is helpful if we want to test code changes without a build and deploy. However, if errors are introduced, they may not be spotted till it’s too late. A useful compromise is to validate JSPs at build time to verify that they will compile. The validator catches syntax errors before the application deploys and starts. This speeds up our build and test cycle and prevents silly mistakes slipping through to production code.

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How To Security Spring Boot

Thymeleaf and Spring Security

June 29, 2017 – 10:05 pm

Thymeleaf is a popular templating engine, particularly with Spring projects. Spring Boot has chosen Thymeleaf as the view technology of choice, largely replacing the need for JSP. With old JSPs, custom tag libraries provided integration with various technologies, including Spring Security. A similar library exists to integrate Thymeleaf and Spring Security – the Thymeleaf Spring read more »

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