Category: Technology
RBAC vs ABAC
Most modern systems have some form of authentication and authorization. Authentication refers to figuring out who someone is (think of user login). Authorization refers to figuring out what a user can do within a system. Just because a user can log in does not mean they can do anything inside a system. In many systems,…
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More SQLite and Swift
In my previous blog post, I mentioned using SQLite with an iOS application. In this post, we will extend that example to support text searching. While SQLite is a single file database that is pretty straightforward to work, it contains a powerful full-text search feature. To use this full-text feature of SQLite, you will need…
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SQLite and Swift
When building an application, you often need some way to store associated data. Applications usually store less data than cloud applications, but many of the same constraints still exist. You still need to store data. Some of the data is relational, such as contacts or addresses. And having the ability to store relational data in…
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Azure Communication Services
Sending SMS (text messages) is pretty straightforward. I have previously written blog posts on how to do this with Twilio and AWS SNS. Now Azure has a service that can send SMS messages without using another service. To start, create an Azure Communication Service. Once your Communication Service is created, you need to get a…
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Safari Push Notifications?
At Don’t Panic Labs, we have built many iOS and Android applications over the years. Many of them have been built using some sort of cross-platform technology, like Ionic. But why so many mobile applications? Not one reason, many reasons. Sometimes customers want to be in the Apple and Google app stores. Sometimes they want…
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Quick Thoughts on Google’s Media CDN
Years ago, I worked at a CDN company, so I am always interested in what is going on in the content delivery space. Where is the industry headed? Last week, a major shake-up in the space occurred. Google is now enabling people to deliver videos with the same platform Google uses for YouTube. With more…
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Estimating Your Cloud Costs
Estimating cloud costs isn’t always easy, especially if your goal is to be super exact. The desire to be super precise will probably cause you to spend more time estimating the costs of resources than the resources might cost themselves. Always remember that development time is expensive. Trying to estimate down to the dollar isn’t…
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CouchDB Views
CouchDB is a pretty amazing technology, but it is a little unique. With many data stores, you just query data. You can do that with CouchDB’s Mango queries, but CouchDB’s primary way to query data is by using views. Views are pre-created, much like creating any document within CouchDB. After creating your view, you can…
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Caddy
A lot of the software we build involves hosting some part of it on a web server. Today, most of what we host is hosted in the cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service). This means we don’t have to look into some more classic hosting options such as Apache or IIS; the platform solves this…
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APIs and the Cloud
Application programming interfaces (APIs) communicate into software. If user interfaces are ways for humans to interact with software, then APIs are ways for software to communicate with other software. As we write applications, our software makes extensive use of APIs. Sometimes those APIs are purely at a platform level, maybe file read and write. Sometimes…
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