Daniel Watrous on Software Engineering

I’m interested in allowing a user to register on my site/app using their social account credentials (e.g. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). It should also be possible to register using an email address. Since the site/app will be composed of a handful of microservices, I would want to provide my own identity service, which might includes […]

I have recently had to work with a few REST APIs that exhibited some poor design choices that I had previously assumed would be obvious. Since they may not be obvious to everyone, I wanted to highlight them. Idempotent operations When an operation is idempotent that means that an end state will be identical regardless […]

Authentication in MongoDB provides ‘normal’, which is full read and write, or ‘readonly’ access at a database level. There are two scenarios when authentication comes into play: single server and multi-server. When using a single server, authentication can be enabled but adding –auth to the startup parameters. When using a replicaset, sharded setup or combination, […]

Security in MongoDB is relatively young in terms of features and granularity. Interestingly, they indicate that a typical use case would be to use Mongo on a trusted network “much like how one would use, say, memcached.” MongoDB does NOT run in secure mode by default. As it is, the features that are available are […]

For simplicity and security I’ve decided to integrate with the Google Account authentication mechanism that’s built into Google App Engine. This allows anyone with a Google account to login to my application without the need to setup another account. This also gives me access to the user’s valid email in order to send messages and […]

Today I was working on a small web application that will run on a corporate intranet. There was an existing LDAP server and many existing web apps use the authentication details cached in the browser (Basic Authentication) to identify a user and determine access levels. My application is written in PHP and I wanted to […]