Swarm of XeBees

For making out applications more secure we generally make use of specialized separate code for security, some api, etc. But recently I came across this term Object Oriented Security. It is about using some good Object Oriented Design Patterns to make your software inherently more secure. I feel it is worth giving a look, when I look at the Cross Site Scripting security issue I see that credit to it goes to violations of some of the very basic OO Principles by JavaScript.

Object oriented software enjoys many of the implicit security advantages. Having a reference to an object implies the authentication to use it. There cannot be a third object interfering when an object calls other. Security in Object Oriented applications can be effected by controlling access to objects. Central is thus the Principle of Least Privilege or Principle of Least Authority; give an Object all that it needs and nothing else.

Some of the Design Patterns that can really help are:
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Filed under: Uncategorized

In this blog, I am going to share my point-of-view for designing “Call to Action (CTA) button/banner”. Whether it is a website or an application we need a trigger for the user to click and fire the event. This may sound simple and yes it is, if we keep a few things in consideration while designing. I have been designing user-friendly websites and applications to persuade the user to take desired action.
For e-commerce website, Call to Action button is the key element for conversion rate drastically. Even minor information shared on your website is important, but some are more important and they have to stand out from the rest of the interface, and this is where Call to Action comes to rescue.
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Filed under: UI, Usability, User Experience

There are a lot of online tutorials/blogs available on how to do testing in Django but this blog is not going to show you how to write a testcase but how to easily organize your testcase all at one place.

Being an organized freak, I like to keep similar things together with proper names and wanted to put all my testcases in the tests directory. I did not want a separate 'tests.py' file in each of my app, and another drawback with the default approach is that I could not test files in my lib directory using django's command:

python manage.py test

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Filed under: Python

As a part of "Improve the Usability" drive, one of the things that came out was to get away with the multiple logins for the user when user hops from one application to another, basically have SSO in place. After analyzing the existing architecture/applications we required below pieces to be in place when we implement SSO functionality.

1) Have SSO across the various applications (including cross domain).
2) Have Customized login (In UI Terms) pages on CAS server for different applications.
3) Ability to post login data over HTTP , so as to provided embedded login page within applications (User won't be redirected to CAS login page in this case).

Given above requirements me and my colleague Pratik did spikes on these frameworks Josso , OpenAM and CAS and at end of the day we partnered with CAS. Also, even though existing applications have different login pages , at back-end they use same db.
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Filed under: Uncategorized

I was exploring the feasibility of using MongoDB with PHP and found that it is a fairly simple process to do the same. For web development I use following system setup:

• Operating System : Microsoft Windows Vista 64 bit
• PHP : 5.3.8
• Web server : Apache/2.2.21

So in this blog we will see how we can configure and use MongoDB with PHP. Read more »

Filed under: mongodb, nosql, PHP