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How Sift Science Rebuilt Its App on React and DropWizard

73 points by necubi 11y ago

matrix 11y ago
If the authors are reading this: in your later articles, I'd love to see some details about what method of authentication and authorization you settled on for the REST API and how well it plays with Dropwizard.
- necubi 11y ago
  Yeah, I think authentication and authorization are two of the hardest challenges in moving to a fully static app architecture. There're some more details in a talk I gave a few months ago (video: https://youtu.be/vHXcDKK4eGY?t=6822 https://youtu.be/vHXcDKK4eGY?t=6822, slides: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uup4tgxyi7uybe0/API-Driven%20Development%20at%20Sift%20Science.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/uup4tgxyi7uybe0/API-Driven%20Devel...), and I'll be writing more (and hopefully open sourcing some code) in the future. The upshot is we settled on OAuth 2.0 with JWT auth tokens, along with some custom DropWizard filters and annotations to enforce authz. We found two-legged OAuth 2.0 pretty straightforward to implement and use.
  - matrix 11y ago
    Sounds like you guys might have used Apache Oltu? If so, I (and I'm sure many others) would be interested in hearing more about that, because modern, non-trivial authorization and authentication is probably the single biggest missing piece for Jersey/Dropwizard.
brandonb 11y ago
This may be covered in one of the future articles, but how have you found HBase as a storage system and Hadoop as the primary system for data processing? If you could start from scratch, what do you think you'd use?
btown 11y ago
Sadly, this is more of a teaser with architecture diagrams than actual content about best practices in React and DropWizard. Looking forward to the future posts, though! On the note of architecture diagrams... if you're geeking out about how to simplify architectures like their "before" picture, I'd highly recommend checking out Confluent's article on LinkedIn's data platform: http://blog.confluent.io/2015/02/25/stream-data-platform-1/ http://blog.confluent.io/2015/02/25/stream-data-platform-1/ It's much in the same vein as this article, but focusing on backend organization. Highly recommended.
- tksb 11y ago
  Shared sentiments here. Anyway, thanks for the link!
- btown 11y ago
  Since this is taking off a bit: Here's an excellent talk that provides some context to the Confluent article, and takes us through the thought process of simplifying convoluted database-cache-user interactions by thinking in terms of streams of derived data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0 . Also highly recommended.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
I rather hear about how companies I've never heard of keep getting ads upvoted on hackernews.
Sirikon 11y ago
What's the benefits of React against others frameworks? I didn't understood yet all the love and hype around React...
- rimunroe 11y ago
  Important note: React doesn't attempt to solve any data modeling issues itself. It just gives you a way to describe to a browser what it should draw when given some data. It's not trying to provide solutions to all the same issues as Angular or other MVCs--it just makes some of those issues not even exist, although it obviously requires you to find solutions to other issues on your own. As for the benefits: React components are super composable. I find myself comfortably reusing modules way more when those modules are React components. Also, there's also low overhead of abstractions to keep track of, so the learning curve is very shallow compared to the ones for figuring out how to draw stuff in a framework like Angular or Ember in my opinion. These aren't by any means the only or even necessarily the biggest ones, they're just ones that I am very fond of.
paukiatwee 11y ago
Great article. I developed a (real world) personal budget app[1] using Angular 1.x + DropWizard. If anyone interested to learn/see source code, the source code is available on Github[2]. [1]: https://www.budgetapp.io/ https://www.budgetapp.io/ [2]: https://github.com/paukiatwee/budgetapp https://github.com/paukiatwee/budgetapp
- kevinherron 11y ago
  Thank you, this is a great example. Exactly what I've been looking for.

73 points by necubi 11y ago

If the authors are reading this: in your later articles, I'd love to see some details about what method of authentication and authorization you settled on for the REST API and how well it plays with Dropwizard.

necubi 11y ago
Yeah, I think authentication and authorization are two of the hardest challenges in moving to a fully static app architecture. There're some more details in a talk I gave a few months ago (video: https://youtu.be/vHXcDKK4eGY?t=6822 https://youtu.be/vHXcDKK4eGY?t=6822, slides: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uup4tgxyi7uybe0/API-Driven%20Development%20at%20Sift%20Science.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/uup4tgxyi7uybe0/API-Driven%20Devel...), and I'll be writing more (and hopefully open sourcing some code) in the future. The upshot is we settled on OAuth 2.0 with JWT auth tokens, along with some custom DropWizard filters and annotations to enforce authz. We found two-legged OAuth 2.0 pretty straightforward to implement and use.
- matrix 11y ago
  Sounds like you guys might have used Apache Oltu? If so, I (and I'm sure many others) would be interested in hearing more about that, because modern, non-trivial authorization and authentication is probably the single biggest missing piece for Jersey/Dropwizard.

brandonb 11y ago

This may be covered in one of the future articles, but how have you found HBase as a storage system and Hadoop as the primary system for data processing? If you could start from scratch, what do you think you'd use?

btown 11y ago

Sadly, this is more of a teaser with architecture diagrams than actual content about best practices in React and DropWizard. Looking forward to the future posts, though! On the note of architecture diagrams... if you're geeking out about how to simplify architectures like their "before" picture, I'd highly recommend checking out Confluent's article on LinkedIn's data platform: http://blog.confluent.io/2015/02/25/stream-data-platform-1/ http://blog.confluent.io/2015/02/25/stream-data-platform-1/ It's much in the same vein as this article, but focusing on backend organization. Highly recommended.

tksb 11y ago
Shared sentiments here. Anyway, thanks for the link!
btown 11y ago
Since this is taking off a bit: Here's an excellent talk that provides some context to the Confluent article, and takes us through the thought process of simplifying convoluted database-cache-user interactions by thinking in terms of streams of derived data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0 . Also highly recommended.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

I rather hear about how companies I've never heard of keep getting ads upvoted on hackernews.

Sirikon 11y ago

What's the benefits of React against others frameworks? I didn't understood yet all the love and hype around React...

rimunroe 11y ago
Important note: React doesn't attempt to solve any data modeling issues itself. It just gives you a way to describe to a browser what it should draw when given some data. It's not trying to provide solutions to all the same issues as Angular or other MVCs--it just makes some of those issues not even exist, although it obviously requires you to find solutions to other issues on your own. As for the benefits: React components are super composable. I find myself comfortably reusing modules way more when those modules are React components. Also, there's also low overhead of abstractions to keep track of, so the learning curve is very shallow compared to the ones for figuring out how to draw stuff in a framework like Angular or Ember in my opinion. These aren't by any means the only or even necessarily the biggest ones, they're just ones that I am very fond of.

paukiatwee 11y ago

Great article. I developed a (real world) personal budget app[1] using Angular 1.x + DropWizard. If anyone interested to learn/see source code, the source code is available on Github[2]. [1]: https://www.budgetapp.io/ https://www.budgetapp.io/ [2]: https://github.com/paukiatwee/budgetapp https://github.com/paukiatwee/budgetapp

kevinherron 11y ago
Thank you, this is a great example. Exactly what I've been looking for.