Social Networks for the life of the world
There are some quick and easy things you can do to make Windows 10 easier to use. X Window System display server Download and install the free and open-source vcsxrv package from SourceForge. Then, configure your ssh to forward X11 packets. Then, when you ssh to a Linux or FreeBSD box, you’ll be able to … Read more
Setting up your web service Dotnet’s stuff for developing web applications includes an inheritable class called ApiController. This makes it easy to develop REST-style web services, either for standalone API servers or in the context of larger servers. To start using ApiController, however, requires navigating lots of Microsoft documentation; as of early 2020 that documentation … Read more
Status Codes Real Web services have to be able to pass back a status code. Maybe it’s a plain 200 success code, or a 404 not found code. Whatever. We have to be able to control it. Here’s how. We’ll use the NegotiatedContentResult template class in the signature for the Get method. We have to … Read more
We send data to a web service via POST, PUT, or PATCH. All these web requests carry a payload: one or more items of data. How do we code these web services to accept data?
JSDoc is a way to put programmer documentation in Javascript code. It’s in the tradition of Doxygen , Javadoc, and C#’s documentation comments. And what a sorry tradition that is. Tools for extracting that kind of documentation and making, well, documents from it are just atrocious. (Set me straight in a comment if I’m wrong.) … Read more
Many people surely know all this by now. Still, here are some things I’ve recently learned about notifying clients (browsers, API clients) about errors. Delivering errors from route handlers to clients This is remarkably easy, once you figure it out. Just use the http-errors package. (Beware, not the http-error package; it does something different. Call … Read more
I needed to do some simple web-page / Javascript debugging work on an Android device. My need was simple: look at the console log. But setting things up to do it was not simple. It didn’t help that most of the online information about this is buried in edits to years-old Stack Overflow answers. Desired … Read more
Sometimes it’s necessary in Javascript in a browser to find out whether an image object loads correctly. You might do this to check whether a server is responding, or whether it’s blocked by a firewall. In plain HTML you would load the image like this <img src=”/maybe.png” /> then look for the browser’s broken-image indicator … Read more
Stripe.com’s Stripe Elements is a great way to handle payment card information in a way that slows down cybercreeps. It’s secure because customers only enter card numbers into Stripe-furnished iframes, never into forms on the site taking payments via Stripe. Here is the sequence diagram for how Stripe Elements handles data flow
Software designers sometimes need to present UML sequence diagrams like this one. This kind of thing is absurdly fiddly to draw with most graphics packages. But there’s a language called PlantUML that allows us to write them as text and render them in various software tools, including WordPress with the plugin called PlantUML Renderer. The … Read more