Nginx Module Extension

My new book Nginx Module Extension is now out on all major online retailers. You will find this as a one stop guide to getting familiar with nginx module system and how to install and configure HTTP and 3rd party modules. The unique thing about this book is a chapter on how to write your own nginx module. Open source is all about creating for yourself and others what doesn’t already exist. Hope nginx users and developers will find it useful.

Error handling in SOAP Web Services – The Right Way

I have seen too many web services (and done a few) where fault handing is not user friendly / graceful.  Most of the times the way people code the web services using annotations or using POJOs in  frameworks like Axis2 the SOAP faults just contains an error message since this is the easiest thing to do. However for  clients this is not too friendly as they can only do error handling  based on your error strings. SOAP 1.2 specifications here , provide a better way of populating your SOAP faults. That is to provide at-least SOAP codes, sub-codes and a fault string as well as details (if possible). This is old news, but i still thought should be talked about.  Continue reading

All you need to know about Search Engine Optimization

Your online businesses are ultimately only as profitable as they are accessible—if no one can find you online, your hard work in creating a useful architecture, providing interesting content, and coding them correctly will be for naught. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play, and most of you know what it is.

Contrary to what you might hear from companies who try to sell SEO services to you, there are no magic secrets that guarantee you’ll be at the top of every list of search results. However, there is a set of free best practices that you can do on your own to make sure your site is as easy to find as possible.

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Getting Around Browser’s Same Origin Policy (SOP) With Proxies, Script Injection , JSONP and CORS

If you work with Web Development or Javascript / Ajax a lot you must have come across browser’s same origin policy or SOP. Same Origin Policy or SOP is a security concept in which documents retrieved from distinct origins are isolated from each other. This is quite strictly implemented by almost all major browsers today.

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Implementing HTTP Digest Authentication in Java

I recently had to implement my own version of RFC 2617 which addresses the digest authentication in http protocol. This RFC is an improvement over RFC 2069 which was the previous version of Digest Access authentication. However RFC 2617 adds some additional security features such as quality of protection (qop) to try to counter re-play attacks. Continue reading

Asynchronous Non-Blocking Backends – Node.js is cool

I am beginning to have a liking for the new stuff everyone is buzzing about. The server side V8 based javascript framework called Node.js.

In the start when i heard about it at a hacker’s get together, i thought its another one of those, cool buzz words framework which makes you cool and hip if you use it.  However after playing around with it for a bit, it seems pretty nice.

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PayPal Integration Primer, Quick way to integrate online payments to your website

Over the years i have worked and integrated with many payment systems and gateways. Some have been server-to-server and some have been “front-end” systems. Some have been extremely simple to integrate and some have been quite complex with fraud prevention and management as part of the integration.

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