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Showing posts from February, 2015

Introduction to Hypertext Application Language (HAL)

Principles of REST architectural style were put forth by Dr. Roy Fielding in his thesis “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures”. One of the main principles of the style is that REST applications should be hypermedia driven , that is the change of an application's state or, in other words, transition from one resource to another, should be done by following the links. The rationale behind this principle is that all possible operations with the resource can be discovered without the need of any out-of-band documentation and if some URI changes, there is no need to change the client as it is server's responsibility to generate URIs and insert them into representations. This principle is also called Hypermedia As The Engine Of An Application state ( HATEOAS ). While the Thesis gives the prescription to use hyperlinks in the representations of resources, Hypertext Application Language (HAL) is one possible recipe for how to do desi...

Getting Started with Dropwizard: Authentication, Configuration and HTTPS

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Here is a link to my Getting Started with Dropwizard course on Udemy. Only $10! In the previous installment of this series we discussed how to create a Dropwizard project using Maven archetype as well as how to create a simple RESTful API and access it. API security is an important topic and today we'll discuss how to use authentication and HTTPS with Dropwizard. Also, the problem of configuring Dropwizard applications will be touched. All the code for the examples below can be found here . Authentication Basic Authentication is a simplest way to secure access to a resource. It boils down to transmitting a base64-encoded column-separated pair of user-ID and password using Authorize HTTP header. If a non-authenticated client tries to access a protected resource, the server prompts the client to provide credentials, that is the aforementioned pair. Otherwise, client may supply the credentials without any prompt from the server. This authentication sch...