Why the Vue 3 Composition API?

This Vue 3 Composition API tutorial makes it clear why the limitations of Vue 2 led to the creation of Vue 3’s Composition API, and how it solves a few problems for us.

We’ll go into detail about some of the challenges you might face with Vue 2, so that you can see where the new API comes in.

Why the Composition API

There’s been some confusion over the new Vue 3 composition API. By the end of this lesson it should be clear why the limitations of Vue 2 have led to its creation, and how it solves a few problems for us.

There are currently three limitations you may have run into when working with Vue 2:

• As your components get larger readability gets difficult.
• The current code reuse patterns all come with drawbacks.
• Vue 2 has limited TypeScript support out of the box.

I will go into detail with the first two, so it’s apparent what problem the new API solves.

Large components can be hard to read & maintain.

To wrap our head around this problem lets think about a component that takes care of searching the products on our website.

The code for this component, using the standard Vue component syntax, is going to look like this:

What happens when we also want to add the ability to sort the search results to this component. Our code then looks like:

Not too bad, until we want to add search filters and pagination features to the same component. Our new features will have code fragments that we’d be splitting amongst all of our component options (components, props, data, computed, methods, and lifecycle methods). If we visualize this using colors (below) you can see how our feature code will get split up, making our component much more difficult to read and parse which code goes with which feature.

As you can imagine (with the image on the right), if we can keep our feature code together, our code is going to be more readable, and thus more maintainable. If we go back to our original example and group things together using the composition API, here’s what it’d look like:

To do this with the setup() method (as shown above), we need to use the new Vue 3 composition API. The code inside setup() is a new syntax that I’ll be teaching in later lessons. It’s worth noting that this new syntax is entirely optional, and the standard way of writing Vue components is still completely valid.

I know when I first saw this, I wondered, “Wait, does this mean I create a gigantic setup method, and put all my code in there? How can that be how this works?”

No, don’t worry, this isn’t what happens. When you organize components by features using the composition API, you’ll be grouping features into composition functions that get called from your setup method, like so:

Using this our components can now be organized by logical concerns (also known as “features”). However, this doesn’t mean that our user interface will be made up of fewer components. You’re still going to use good component design patterns to organize your applications:

Now that you’ve seen how the Component API allows you to make large components more readable and maintainable, we can move on to the second limitation of Vue 2.

There’s no perfect way to reuse logic between components.

When it comes to reusing code across components there are 3 good solutions to do this in Vue 2, but each has its limitations. Let’s walk through each with our example. First, there are Mixins.

The good

• Mixins can be organized by feature.

The not so good

• They are conflict-prone, and you can end up with property name conflicts.
• Unclear relationships on how mixins interact, if they do.
• Not easily reusable if I want to configure the Mixin to use across other components.

This last item leads us to take a look at Mixin Factories, which are functions that return a customized version of a Mixin.

As you can see above, Mixin Factories allow us to customize the Mixins by sending in a configuration. Now we can configure this code to use across multiple components.

The good

• Easily reusable now that we can configure the code.
• We have more explicit relationships of how our Mixins interact.

The not so good

• Namespacing requires strong conventions and discipline.
• We still have implicit property additions, meaning we have to look inside the Mixin to figure out what properties it exposes.
• There’s no instance access at runtime, so Mixin factories can’t be dynamically generated.

Luckily, there’s one more solution that can often be the most useful, Scoped Slots:

The good

• Addresses just about every downside of Mixins.

The not so good

• Your configuration ends up in your template, which ideally should only contain what we want to render.
• They increases indentation in your template, which can decrease readability.
• Exposed properties are only available in the template.
• Since we’re using 3 components instead of 1, it’s a bit less performant.

So as you can see, each solution has limitations. Vue 3’s composition API provides us a 4th way to extract reusable code, which might look something like this:

Now we’re creating components using the composition API inside functions that get imported and used in our setup method, where we have any configuration needed.

The good

• We’re writing less code, so it’s easier to pull a feature from your component into a function.
• It builds on your existing skills since you’re already familiar with functions.
• It’s more flexible than Mixins and Scoped Slots since they’re just functions.
• Intellisense, autocomplete, and typings already work in your code editor.

The not so good

• Requires learning a new low-level API to define composition functions.
• There are now two ways to write components instead of just the standard syntax.

Hopefully, the “why” behind the composition API is now clear to you, I know it wasn’t clear to me at first. In the next lesson I’ll be diving into the new syntax for composing components.

#vue-js #javascript #web-development

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Vue 3 Infinite Scroll with the Composition API

At the time of writing, Vue.js version 3 is in beta. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t start using it. In fact, this the best time to start experimenting with the new API and get ready for the official release.

In this tutorial, we will be building an infinite scroll hook with the new Composition API. we will be creating reactive-data, computed values, and using lifecycle methods.

#vue #composition-api #vue 3 #api

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

1. Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
2. Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

• Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
• Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
• The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

8 Popular Websites That Use The Vue.JS Framework

In this article, we are going to list out the most popular websites using Vue JS as their frontend framework.

Vue JS is one of those elite progressive JavaScript frameworks that has huge demand in the web development industry. Many popular websites are developed using Vue in their frontend development because of its imperative features.

This framework was created by Evan You and still it is maintained by his private team members. Vue is of course an open-source framework which is based on MVVM concept (Model-view view-Model) and used extensively in building sublime user-interfaces and also considered a prime choice for developing single-page heavy applications.

Released in February 2014, Vue JS has gained 64,828 stars on Github, making it very popular in recent times.

Evan used Angular JS on many operations while working for Google and integrated many features in Vue to cover the flaws of Angular.

“I figured, what if I could just extract the part that I really liked about Angular and build something really lightweight." - Evan You

#vuejs #vue #vue-with-laravel #vue-top-story #vue-3 #build-vue-frontend #vue-in-laravel #vue.js

An API-First Approach For Designing Restful APIs | Hacker Noon

I’ve been working with Restful APIs for some time now and one thing that I love to do is to talk about APIs.

So, today I will show you how to build an API using the API-First approach and Design First with OpenAPI Specification.

First thing first, if you don’t know what’s an API-First approach means, it would be nice you stop reading this and check the blog post that I wrote to the Farfetchs blog where I explain everything that you need to know to start an API using API-First.

Preparing the ground

Before you get your hands dirty, let’s prepare the ground and understand the use case that will be developed.

Tools

If you desire to reproduce the examples that will be shown here, you will need some of those items below.

• NodeJS
• OpenAPI Specification
• Text Editor (I’ll use VSCode)
• Command Line

Use Case

To keep easy to understand, let’s use the Todo List App, it is a very common concept beyond the software development community.

#api #rest-api #openai #api-first-development #api-design #apis #restful-apis #restful-api