So. Much. Express.

Models, Views, Controllers, Middleware, Authentication, and Heroku deployment was the name of the game this week. Which meant I built a lot of little apps both in class and after. Check out this pizza app I worked on for homework here.

Express authentication got me thinking about other ways to implement authentication. Some google searches lead me down a JWT auth rabbithole. Here’s what I learned:

JSON Web Tokens are generated by the server in order to verify a user’s identity. The server then sends the token to the client. Once the client has the token, it has the ability to send the token back to the server for every request it makes from then on (the server then knows that the user has been previously verified, so it grants access to whatever data the client’s requesting). Because JWTs are cryptographically signed, they can’t be intercepted and subsequently modified without proving it to be invalid after the fact.

I’m hoping to have the opportunity to explore other ways of implementing authentication and have put JWT auth on the back burner for a future project.

Next week’s another project week. I’m planning to create a cocktail recipe finder where users can browse recipes from this API, create collections, and save recipes to their collections. I’m planning to work out some basic wireframes, a database schema diagram, and a list of HTTP routes this weekend before my proposal’s due on Monday. I’ll be using PostgreSQL, Node.js, Express, and ejs. Looking forward to getting started!

Here’s the repo to follow my progress.