Articles in category Development

Setting up a project with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and GraphQL is actually pretty straightforward. But first, some prerequisites. For this tutorial (tested on versions 2.7.3, 6.1.4.1 and 11.0 respectively), you must have all three, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and GraphQL installed on your development machine. Some general knowledge of Ruby and Rails is also recommended. Before we begin, however, you might be wondering why anyone would want to replace the perfectly fine experience provided by the traditional REST API with one offered by GraphQL. Well, one obvious reason is that GraphQL deals quite elegantly with resources over- and under-fetching. With GraphQL you are given the exact information you request - nothing more, nothing less. Moreover, it is almost self-documenting, making that one less item on your list of things to worry about. And there are other pros to GraphQL, such as it being both strongly typed and language and database independent. But in the meantime, I'll leave those for you to explore on your own. So, without further ado, let’s set up our first GraphQL API on Ruby on Rails.

If your head is in the cloud then it's likely you'll recognize the terms in this blog title, each with that double 'a' in the middle.  They refer, of course, to the three major cloud computing models in common use today: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. If your head is not in the cloud but is thinking perhaps it should be, then read on: understanding these models, their capabilities, their pros and their cons are crucial to deciding which format is best for your business. This post will take you through the difference between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, what each offers, and which areas of your business will factor in determining the most suitable option.

When building an API, sooner or later you’ll have to secure it with some kind of authentication schema. There are many industry-standard solutions available - JWTs, sessions, OpenID... Then, after implementing one you'll feel satisfaction - your API is secured!  That is until one of your customers gains access to another's data. Uh-oh. You forgot the authorization - again!