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An article by Pierre Jambet about his discovery of Railway Oriented Programming (ROP).

If you new to the concept of ROP, here is the blurb:

Many examples in functional programming assume that you are always on the “happy path”. But to create a robust real world application you must deal with validation, logging, network and service errors, and other annoyances. ROP tries to address these in clean functional way.

The article then tries to implement ROP with use of Either type:

• Translating F# to Scala
• The ROP DSL
• Validation
• One-track functions
• Dead end functions & exception handling
• Adding log

The article contains plenty of code examples with links to further reading. Excellent read for any fan of functional programming!

The SMAPI SDK makes it easier than ever to build Alexa skill management and reporting functions into web, mobile, and desktop apps using one of the supported languages (Node.js, Python, and Java). By Greg Bulmash.

The Alexa Skill Management API (SMAPI) provides a REST-based API to do anything with your skills that you can do with the Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (ASK CLI) or the Alexa developer console. In fact, a lot of the functionality of both utilize it.

Recently, Amazon released the Alexa SMAPI SDK to make incorporating the Skill Management API into your code easier. This blog post offers some tips for working with the SDK, by walking through the NodeJS example scripts in the Alexa Cookbook SMAPI SDK demo.

The article then deals with:

• Setup (including the demo from the Alexa Cookbook on Github)
• Integrate login with Amazon into your code
• Running the listSkills.js sample
• Running the getMetrics.js sample
• Get started with the SMAPI SDK today

You will also get links to more resources and reading so you can really become Alexa skills ninja in a jiffy. Great read!

In this straightforward tutorial, we’ll learn how to create an SAP Analytics Cloud chatbot with SAP Conversational AI, and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) Custom Widget. By Ferry Djaja.

The goal of this tutorial is to enable the users to interact and add the chatbot interface in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), Analytics Application. The bot will reply with the answer by updating the Analytics Application UI elements like a chart, widget, table, etc. For our case, we’ll design the bot to update the table based on the user’s question.

Source: https://cai.tools.sap/blog/how-to-build-chatbot-for-sap-analytics-cloud-with-sap-conversational-ai/

The tutorial then gives detailed instructions on:

• Flow Diagram
• SAP Analytics Cloud Custom Widget
• SAP Conversational AI Bot Development
• Bot Server
• SAP Analytics Cloud, Analytics Application
• Usage

This step by step tutorial with loads of screen shots and explanations what yuo are doing during chat bot building process. You will also get video demo and links to further reading and resources. Great!

Web servers bring together many useful services in traditional web development. Developers use servers like Apache and NGINX for many common tasks. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP formed the LAMP stack to power a large percentage of the world’s websites. Other variants, like the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, Node.js), have also been popular. By James Beswick.

In the migration to serverless, it’s important to understand where this functionality moves to. There are significant benefits in taking a serverless approach to developing web apps but there are differences in where developers spend their efforts. This blog post provides a guide to serverless development for traditional web developers to help with this transition.

To run a “Hello World” example in a highly available configuration, using a traditional webserver approach you need more than one server in more than one Availability Zone. This server contains an operating system, runtime, and web server software, together with your code. You might build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to help with creating more servers. The guide then deals with:

• Comparing a “Hello World” example
• Implementing authentication in serverless web apps
• Generating HTML, CSS and front-end templates
• Uploading, processing, and saving binary files
• Storing application state

Application state: For functions that need a durable store of user data that can be rehydrated between invocations, Amazon DynamoDB tables provide a low-latency, cost-effective solution. For example, this is ideal for recalling shopping cart contents or user profiles. Great guide!

DevSecOps is about introducing security earlier in the life cycle of application development, thus minimizing vulnerabilities and bringing security closer to IT and business objectives. By Lucian Constantin.

DevSecOps is a culture shift in the software industry that aims to bake security into the rapid-release cycles that are typical of modern application development and deployment, also known as the DevOps movement. Embracing this shift-left mentality requires organizations to bridge the gap that usually exists between development and security teams to the point where many of the security processes are automated and handled by the development team itself.

The article then reads:

• How does DevSecOps differ from traditional software development?
• Achieving true security/development integration
• DevSecOps testing and tools
• DevSecOps adoption

That said, even with DevSecOps, some tasks will still need to be performed by security professionals and manual testing still has its role to play. For example, it’s hard to find logic flaws or design flaws using completely automated scans. You will also get plenty of links to further resources. Nice one!

In the current tech world, Firebase is one of the most trending technologies that help you to make a super cool web app or mobile apps in a short span of time. Firebase is a BaSS (backend as a service) provided by Google. By Sm0ke.

Firebase provides all the tools and the stuff that you will need to make your web app or mobile Applications. Some of the services that usually need to develop or configure while making some app are to configure servers, manage hosting, manage user authentication, write the crud operation logic for our app, storage, push notifications and the list goes on.

Firebase provides you the backed SDK for managing the database. You can easily do the CRUD operation with the help of this SDK, but sometimes you have to write your own backend logic, this is where the Firebase cloud functions helps. Just write your backend code and deploy it as the cloud functions and call your code with the help of https service as you called the simple API.

The article then explains:

• Firebase Realtime - real time database
• Firestore Database
• Firebase Authentication
• Firebase Hosting Service
• Firebase Storage
• Cloud functions
• Firebase ML Kit

And on top of it all you will also get a little demo project with screen shots and example code and instructions how to connect it to Google Analytics. Good read!

In this article, we will learn how to implement Azure serverless with Blazor web assembly. And to do that, we will create an app that lists out some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on Covid-19. By Ankit Sharma.

The tutorial covers how to:

• Create an Azure Cosmos DB which will act as our primary database to store questions and answers
• Use an Azure function app to fetch data from cosmos DB
• Deploy the function app to Azure to expose it globally via an API endpoint
• And lastly, how to consume the API in a Blazor web assembly app
• What is a serverless architecture?
• What is an Azure function?
• What is Blazor?

Blazor supports a wide array of features to make web development easier for us. Some of the prominent features of Blazor are: Component-based architecture: Blazor provides us with a component-based architecture to create rich and composable UI; Dependency injection: This allows us to use services by injecting them into components; Dependency injection: This allows us to use services by injecting them into components…

This is step by step tutorial with excellent explanation of each step, screen shots explaining how to publish Azure function and links to further resources. Great read!

Developing Python projects in local environments can get pretty challenging if more than one project is being developed at the same time. Bootstrapping a project may take time as we need to manage versions, set up dependencies and configurations for it. By Anca Iordache @docker.com.

A good way to do this is to create isolated development environments for each project. This can be easily done by using containers and Docker Compose to manage them. Author covered this in a series of blog posts, each one with a specific focus.

Content of this guide:

• Containerize a Python service
• Dockerfile
• Development Best Practices for Dockerfiles
• Multi-stage builds

Although multi-stage builds may not be really useful during development time, they covered it quickly as it is interesting for shipping the containerized Python application once development is done. Links to best practices and further reading also included. And definitely folow the link to part two of the article. Excellent read!

In mid-April 2019, Microsoft gently nudged a young framework from the “anything is possible” experimental phase to a “we’re committed to making this happen” preview. The framework, named Blazor because it runs in the browser and leverages a templating system or “view engine” called Razor, enables the scenario .NET developers almost gave up on. By Jeremy Likness, Cloud Advocate for Azure @Microsoft.

WebAssembly is a new client-side technology that enables near-native performance without plug-ins in all modern browsers, including mobile. WebAssembly, a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. WebAssembly provides a portable compile target (called Wasm, for short).

Many languages, including C, C#, Go, and Rust, can compile code that targets the stack-based WebAssembly virtual machine.

Blazor is a client-side library that uses .NET on WebAssembly to support Single Page Applications written in C# using Razor templates.

The article main sections:

• The Silverlight hope
• JavaScript as a platform
• WebAssembly: a new hope
• The Browser and Razor View Engine
• C# in the Browser (with dependency injection)
• Reusable components

… and more. You will fined detailed explanation how Blazor works in a browser. Also plenty of links to further reading. Very exciting!

The purpose of the blog is to introduce you to incorporating high assurance cryptographic security with hardware security modules (HSMs) into your Red Hat OpenShift projects. Since this might be new territory for some in the developer community, author will take a moment to explain what an HSM is. By Oli-Wade.

An HSM is a specialized hardware device that is designed for the purpose of protecting encryption keys and conducting cryptographic processes such as creating digital signatures. Keys are generated according to strict security standards and based on an internal high-quality entropy source. HSMs are robust, tamper-resistant devices that incorporate innovative security features to ensure the protection of sensitive key material.

Source: https://securityboulevard.com/2020/07/self-contained-ready-and-secured-enhancing-red-hat-openshift-with-hardware-cryptography/

The alternative to using an HSM is to store encryption keys in software – which can be risky since skilled attackers can identify critical key material based on its unique, random characteristics. High value keys should be protected to the best achievable standards, since their loss might cause considerable financial and reputational damage – as well as a compliance violation. HSMs provide this protection and many are certified to internationally-recognized standards like FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria, while also being recognized by security auditors as an effective tool to mitigate cyber risk.

The article describes how to go about:

• Building container images
• Running containerised applications in OpenShift
• Increased application security

To learn more about nCipher nShield HSMs and the integration with Red Hat OpenShift, download their solution brief on the page. Good read!