JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Breaking down the possibilities of breaking in.

My question has to do with JavaScript security.

Imagine an auth system where you're using a JavaScript framework like Backbone or AngularJS, and you need secure endpoints. That's not a problem, as the server always has the last word and will check if you're authorized to do what you want.

But what if you need a little security without involving the server? Is that possible?

For example, say you've got a client-side routing system and you want a concrete route to be protected for logged-in users. So you ping the server asking if you're allowed to visit protected routes and you go on. The problem is that when you ping the server, you store the response in a variable, so the next time you go to a private route, it will check that if you're already logged in (no ping to the server), and depending on the response it will go or not.

How easy is for a user to modify that variable and get access?

In this tut, we are gonna see how the API stuffs does it work and return backs the response to our blog tut.

So, What are the things we gonna see...

• What the heck is REST & Why we need to use?
• Building our Application as RESTFul Service using PHP Slim Framework and storing in MongoDB.
• Sending back the Response to our AngularJS

So, What are the things we gonna see...

• Updated structuring for AngularJS
• Making an RESTFUL API Call
• Use of AngularJs Resource

Sometime ago, we have learned how to automate stuffs with the help of Yeoman and GruntJs. But, in growing application, we need to properly place certain files in certain places so we can jump to files easily(With the help of Sublime Of course!). 

In this series, we would learn about knockout.js and its integration with other client side technologies. In Part 1, we would cover the following :

• What is Knockout (KO)
• MVVM Pattern
• Scenario

What we are going to cover here:

• Problem Statement
• Implementation without Knockout
• Implementation with Knockout

In this article, I'm going to look at the JavaScript data-binding library Knockout.js. I'll expand on my previous article by removing the external templating library and using Knockout to bind and render the data.

One important thing to point out is that I won't be touching the server-side code at all. One goal of my previous article was to expose my application's functionality as raw data -- JSON data, to be precise. By removing the use of partial views (which are data + presentation combined), my options for how I work with the data have increased enormously. Last time, I used EJS (Embedded JavaScript). Today, I'll use Knockout. In the future, who knows? But the important point is that because of my architecture, I have options.

Implementing a layout/sections concept in Angular

Coming from an ASP.NET MVC background, one of the concepts I found myself missing was that of "sections". A solution I came up with was to use two custom directives:

• octo-placeholder designates an area on the parent layout where content will be placed
• octo-section designates content that will be added to the parent layout

In the first part of this series about supporting focus and blur events I elected to follow the template in the AngularJS source code for event directives. This proved to be quite insightful as the AngularJS team just released 1.2.0rc1 which now supports these events natively in the same manner. This means you can just drop in the new version, remove the custom directives and any dependencies on these directives should still work! Check it out for yourself!

But to illustrate this point even further, lets continue with a previous discussion from the first part of this series. Namely the discussion about which adverb should be used for these event directives, "on" or "while". In the first part the directives used the "on" approach for each event. But this doesn't mean we still can't support "while". In fact, we already did in the original example by using both "on" events and storing the state in a scoped variable, focused.

While that list is pretty extensive there are two glaring omissions, namely blur and focus events. Luckily these can be easily added as you will see below.

Since there is nothing uniquely special about these two events compared to the list above, we can use the AngularJS source code as a template for adding two directives to support these events. The bonus for doing that is extrapolating and slightly modifying the code for our goals is quick and painless. Lesson to be learned: always look to the source for tips and guidance.

First, a note discussing this approach. I have read various development threads discussing how a focus and/or a blur directive should work. The main debate seems to boil down to a disagreement between essentially adverbs. Specifically 'on' and 'while'. The latter assigns a state indicator that can be monitored to determine if an element is currently blurred or focused. The former, which is the approach the following example will use, follows the native browser event listeners for firing when an event occurs.