Category: REST API

Building an API service can be complex and time-intensive, but a few well-positioned API services and open source libraries can reduce developer frustration and accelerate your time-to-market. In this post, you’ll create a complete API service plus a site to consume it and then drop in a few clever additions to smooth your way. When …

Heads up… this article is old! For an updated version of this article, see Build an iOS App with Secure Authentication in 20 Minutes on the Okta developer blog. When building mobile apps, authentication is usually the last thing you and your team want to think about. With so many problems to be working on, …

Here at Stormpath, we give developers easy access to user management features – including authentication, authorization, and password reset – via our REST API and language-specific SDKs. Our team of experts began with already-significant knowledge about REST+JSON API design. In the process of building the REST API, they learned even more. Our CTO, Les Hazelwood, …

Update 5/12/2016: Watch Stormpath CTO Les Hazlewood’s presentation on REST + JSON API design best practices.   While the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) has been the dominant approach to web service interfaces for a long time, REST (Representational State Transfer) is quickly winning out and now represents over 70% of public APIs. REST + …

Update 5/11/2016:  Developing in Node.js? Try out nJwt, the cleanest JSON Web Token (JWT) library for Node.js developers, built and maintained by Stormpath. Building APIs is a craft; you have you have to balance the integrity of your data model with with the convenience needs of your API consumers. As you build an API, you will …

What’s with the obsession over building every component of their application themselves, nowadays? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people building their own analytics service. It’s crazy! This problem, and many like it, has been solved a million times over. Building every part of your application yourself is almost always a bad …

Or… How to Commandeer a Starship Many customers have asked us how to do fine-grained permissions for users managed in Stormpath. Good news! With customData, you now have tons of flexibility in modeling user permissions. Stormpath was intentionally designed with a fairly generic model for role-based access control. Because our customers use the API for …

Stormpath customData is a powerful way to store almost any data related to a user. It vastly expands integration to third party services and abolishes the need for user tables. (Read the docs) But with great power comes great responsibility. Here are some important considerations when storing custom user data in Stormpath. Let’s start with …

The most-requested feature has just been added to Stormpath. Custom user data is here. “I want to add my own data to Accounts and Groups in Stormpath, so I can keep all my user data in one place and not have to build and manage user tables in my DB.” You can now store any user data …

Update 5/12/2016: Stormpath now secures authentication to your API- without code! Also, we have some awesome new resources for API developers building user management: Easy API Key Management with Node.js PHP API Authentication is a PITA! The Fundamentals of REST API Design (a presentation by Stormpath CTO Les Hazlewood) Also, we’d love to have you …