Recently I had to implement Single Sign On (SSO) for one of the Rails app I’d been working on. Since Devise is already fairly popular to integrate an authentication system in Rails app, I was more inclined towards using it to achieve SSO. So essentially what was required is a single user manager app that can act as a Provider (OAuth2 ?) and different applications (or Clients) that can authenticate themselves using this same user manager. An important part of SSO is, once you sign in to one of the client, you should automatically be authorized to access all the other clients (their login-protected sections/modules). Similarly, logging out from one service should log out from all other services.
Category: Web Development
What is Rack and Rack Middlewares (Basis of Ruby Frameworks) ?
Rack is a very thin interface between Ruby frameworks and web servers that support Ruby. What it basically means is that it provides a minimal API for connecting web servers (supporting Ruby) and web frameworks (that implement it).
Continue reading “What is Rack and Rack Middlewares (Basis of Ruby Frameworks) ?”
Passing Data Across Components with Contexts (childContextTypes, getChildContext(), contextTypes) in ReactJS
Using React Contexts we can communicate across a hierarchy of Components. To understand this, think of a widget represented by a View component which has lots of child view components. You might use/re-use this component and want to pass certain properties or attributes that are relevant to different child components affecting the overall state (look and behaviour) of the main component in combination. Now one way to achieve this is by using props. But imagine passing an attribute all the way down from the parent to a child at the 5th level in the hierarchy. At every component level the property passed from the parent will have to be accessed (this.props.propName) and further passed down. This can get really messy. So let’s see how contexts can be used to pass data across components in a much elegant manner.
An Overview of OOCSS, BEM, SMACSS (CSS Methodologies/Practices) with References
Writing CSS is really simple, we’ve been doing that since many years. But the problem is, in larger projects where the CSS code grows over thousands of lines, whether you’re alone or it is a team maintaining and building on the code, it gets really unwieldy (spaghetti code). Code gets hard to maintain, harder to debug, unoptimized leading to poor performance and highly inefficient. New team members start adding more code (classes, IDs, etc.) and start using them leading to a lot of redundant and unoptimized code here and there. Basically it gets hard, really hard. You end up into too many issues.
Continue reading “An Overview of OOCSS, BEM, SMACSS (CSS Methodologies/Practices) with References”
Remove a Mounted React Component with React.unmountComponentAtNode()
While going through the codebase of React Bootstrap (for some reason), I came across an interesting implementation of a “React playground”. The code behind the playground is in ReactPlayground.js. I found this piece of interesting code there:
Continue reading “Remove a Mounted React Component with React.unmountComponentAtNode()”
React Integrating Routing to Material UI’s Left Nav (or Other Components)
Working with the React Material UI and trying to make routing work (or even understand how it works) with clicks on the LeftNav item items ? It’s actually quite simple once you get a hang of it. I’ll show you the code and explain the logic behind how on clicking navigation links in LeftNav you navigate to different pages/URLs in your app/website (in a snap). We’ll be using React Router, Material UI and obviously, ReactJS itself. I’ve also uploaded the code to Github.
Continue reading “React Integrating Routing to Material UI’s Left Nav (or Other Components)”
JavaScript Copy to ClipBoard (without Flash) using Cut and Copy Commands with document.execCommand()
Using the cut and copy commands via document.execCommand(), a text selection can be cut or copied to the user’s clipboard in Chrome 43+, Opera 29+ and IE 10+. This means we can now cater to a part of our web userbase with the copy to clipboard feature without using Flash. Let’s write some code to see these commands in action.