Free Online Courses from MIT For Java Web Applications
[adsenseyu2] Following are 4 courses from MIT Open Courseware (OCW) that a newbie would consider for enhancing his concepts for working in Java web applications: Software Engineering for Web Applications: The objective of the course is to enhance the familiarity of students with some of the following key concepts: Concurrency Unpredictable load Security risks Opportunity for wide-area distributed computing Creating a reliable and stateful user experience on top of unreliable connections and stateless protocols Extreme requirements and absurd development schedules Requirements that change mid-way through a project, sometimes because of experience gained from testing with users User demands for a multi-modal interface The entire course can be downloaded from following link: …
Ongoing Research & Development in NIT Surathkal
NIT Surathkal, one of the premier engineering colleges of India has following two departments where research & development related to computer science is going on. Computer Science & Engineering: The departments supports research in different areas such as application security etc. One of the interesting ongoing project is development of tool for detection of SQL injection vulnerabilities in the web applications. Information Technology: The department of information technology is currently supporting research, primarily, in the area of data mining, distributed computing and web services. The other areas of research includes big data, semantics web, security etc.
Top 5 Bad Application Security Practices
We all come across good security practices and make ourselves familiar with them to develop secured code. However, it may also be good idea at times to know about some of the bad security practices such that we, for sure, try and avoid them. [adsenseyu2] Following are top 5 bad practices you may want to know about: Do NOT interact with un-trusted programs: Make sure that the external programs that your program is invoking for reasons such as data or functionality, must have got reviewed and tested for security compliance. One of the common entry points into secured applications are these unsecured applications and hackers just love them. Hackers, …
Top Architecture & Governance Principles for 2014
Following are some of the key architecture and governance principles that you could adopt for your project for this year 2014. The architecture principles could be seen as “guiding principles” based on which team would want to design, develop and test the applications. Key Architecture Principles (Guiding Principles) Holistic approach to application security: Given that applications could be accessed from different channels including web and mobile devices, the attack vectors for hacker has increased to a great extent. Thus, traditional approach of applying perimeter level security and doing security penetration testing may not suffice. Instead, it may be a good idea to take a holistic approach towards application security as …
Top 5 Computing Fundamentals to Learn for a Prosperous 2014
For those of you looking to find out what will be good to learn in this new year, it would be OK to believe that computing fundamentals has become more important than ever before and it would be good to learn the same in 2014 rather than any of the programming languages such as java, .NET, or languages belonging to open-source stack. Following are some key computing fundamentals to focus upon in the coming year: Performance Engineering: As every business is planning to move their applications to cloud for various different reasons including cost-cutting measures, it has become much more important to write efficient application which makes the optimized usage …
How to Design & Develop Cloud-Ready Applications?
I have come across many a developers who were seen to have blank face when talked about the fundamentals on how to design and develop cloud ready applications. Taking a step back, most of them are still unaware of what is meaning of cloud computing and, do they require to acquire one or more specific skill sets to design and develop cloud ready applications? In short, a cloud-ready applications can be developed using any programming language. All that is required is to keep in mind few design and development fundamentals in this relation. By the way, as per the technology trends for 2014 published by several analysts, it is high …
Campus Bytes – New Initiative
We are starting on with a new initiative where we would like to review and write about the research & development going on in several engineering colleges across the country (India) and, how they could benefit different IT companies. This would include reviews on white papars published in different journals, college websites, interviews from paper authors, lecturers and professors. In addition, we would like to invite key stakeholders from different IT companies to present their views on these papers and any further research that they would want to fund in one or more areas from within colleges. If you belong to one or more colleges and would like to submit …
Developer Analysis of Hacker’s Attack on Target Stores – Page 1
This is a series of articles to represent developer’s point of view and learning from recent TARGET retail store security attack due to which various reports say that around 40 million customer credit and debit cards data must have got compromised. This hackers’ attck is currently talk of the town and is under analysis of various different security agencies including US secret service. In this article, we shall look at various different possibilities/attack vectors/security vulnerabilities that could have led to third attack. One of the many possibilities could have been installation of malware at the POS system where customers use to swipe their card for the purchases that they make. This could have …
Tips & Techniques for Estimating Software Testing Effort
Even before we go about looking into tips and techniques for doing effort estimation for testing, it may be kept in mind that testing can be secluded as a separate task. It starts with the start of the project by starting to analyzing the project requirements and come up with a test plan comprising of test cases (primarily) and goes on till the end in form of performing the tests. However, it may be good idea to understand different aspects of testing to be done in the project and assign efforts accordingly if the testing includes specific attention due to various different reasons. Also, different software development methodologies such as …
Google Email or MS Exchange Server for Corporate Accounts
Before we discuss on the difference between Google Apps and MS Exchange Server for corporate email accounts, it goes without saying that Google apps (email) can be used with MS outlook as email client. This is provided by Google for people who are not comfortable with the GMail client. These people can use the same features using MS Outlook. [adsenseyu2] If you want to understand criteria based on which you could decide whether to use Google Email or MS Exchange Server for various purposes including corporate email accounts, following are some of the key differences: Email Search: “Search email” feature in Google is any day better than MS Exchange email …
Top 7 Secured Practices for Securing Your Partner APIs
If you are planning to publish partner APIs for exposing your business services or data to your partners and customers, you may want to consider following top 7 secured best practices to ensure application level security: [adsenseyu2] Access-token based Authentication: Have your partners’ applications authenticate itself (and its users) using access-tokens rather than actual passwords. This is because access-tokens may be easily time-boxed and can be enforced to be renewed at the regular time-intervals. And the theft of access token can not really compromise the actual users’ password with the parent application. In this relation, you may consider using OAuth based authentication technique. In addition to usage of access-token for …
API Economy & Rich Dad, Poor Dad
In recent times, as I have been hearing about and, reading a lot on API related articles including topics such as application programming interfaces (APIs) economy, API-First, API-driven development etc, I got extremely fascinated with this API thing. This is where I decided to put my findings around when, why and how to go for API adoption and whether it would be fruitful for business to go for APIs from strategy perspective. Interestingly enough, I found some connection between API thing, and the central theme of the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. This is where I thought to use key themes from the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad to present …
Must-have Application Development Skills for 2014
Following are some of the key must-have skills, every developer would want to acquire in order to create applications which align well with the technology trends of the coming year, 2014: Cloud readiness: As many applications have started moving into cloud, you never know when the application you have been working on, would also need to be moved to cloud. However, could any application be moved to cloud just like that? Not really. Following are some of the key characteristics that application would need to have in order to be ready to be moved to cloud: High Performance: An under-performing application could end up utilizing lot of resources in the …
May Your Application R.I.P – Part 1
[adsenseyu2] Didn’t really mean that (R.I.P) way, Indeed. 🙂 The objective behind this series of blogs is to represent some of the best practices, the how-tos and the whats/whys in relation with REST based integration of applications. Before we shall talk on any related aspects of REST and how to design great RESTful services and, why go for RESTful design in the very first place, lets try and understand a little bit on what is REST and, “Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA)”. What is REST? REST is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems like WWW. REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. The term first originated in 2000 doctoral dissertation of …
OWASP Security Misconfiguration – Classic Example – 1
[adsenseyu2] One of the OWASP top 10 application security vulnerability is Security Misconfiguration. One of the most common way to identify the security misconfiguration configuration is to check if error handling reveals stack traces or other informative error messages to users. I tried and run an automated scanner on this website, http://www.davrohini.org/ and got various different URLs which revealed stack traces including some of the following: http://www.davrohini.org/user/users.jsp http://www.davrohini.org/user/snews.jsp http://www.davrohini.org/user/left.jsp However, the most dangerous one of the above is http://www.davrohini.org/user/left.jsp. Take a look at the screenshot below. Security Misconfiguration Example – Showing compilation errors Take a look at another diagram below that shows the information regarding the server Apache Tomcat …
What to Learn on Day One of Application Development
Well, I would surely not recommend you to go over the application code and look for things like classes, interfaces, data model, design patterns etc. It definitely has to be everything else than the application code. If you have just landed on to a new application development project and shall be going to start working on the application soon, you may want to understand some of the following on day one rather than nitty-gritties of the application itself: Business overview: The idea is to understand key business functions which is served by the application. The output of business overview can be functional decomposition which can be later related to one …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me