Auto VS Keycloak

I like to use AutoService to make using Java's ServiceLoader easier.

I've also had great luck combining that with AutoValue to allow production vs test injections without the new Foo(thing, null, null, null, thing2, null, null) situation:

AutoValue has posted a new doc comparing itself to Java record classes. (Records were new in Java 16, or earlier with --enable-preview.)

That means I don't forget about fields (as can happen if you're just doing `person.setX()` all the time). It's easy to see what is what when reading it. I can delete fields I don't want to initialize at the time. Yes, maybe immutable objects are the One True Way, but C# lets me choose (I can label properties with an initializer `init` rather than a setter `set` and then they're immutable).

Kotlin offers stuff like this too because it's really useful toward creating code that's easy to create and maintain. Go also lets you initialize structs in a similar fashion.

Java has come back to us a decade or more late with records. They're not bad, but they're only offering one thing. They don't cover what C#, Kotlin, Go, and other languages have offered for so long.

The annoying thing about Java is that it doesn't feel pragmatic a lot of the time. It feels like the language hates stealing ideas from others. It's Java: people steal ideas from Java, not the other way around. People do crazy things just to get POJOs including Immutables (http://immutables.github.io), AutoValue (https://github.com/google/auto/), Lombok (https://projectlombok.org), Joda Beans (https://www.joda.org/joda-beans/), and maybe more. They generate lots of code at compile time or do funky runtime stuff.

It just feels like Java misses the pragmatic stuff and still kinda doesn't want to handle that. I feel a bit silly harping on things like POJOs and setting data on a new object, but that's a big part of day-to-day stuff and it definitely pushes users away from Java towards languages that seem "better" simply because they don't have Java's oddly strong attachment to not offering simple value objects. Yes, again, records do something - but it feels like Java ignored how people are using Kotlin, Go, C#, and more and didn't go for something that would have been as widely applicable and pragmatic as it could have been.

Java has a lot of great stuff like great GCs (yes), lots of cool research, great performance, and Project Loom is really exciting. I just wish the language would lean a little more practical.

The main disadvantage of Java is the boilerplate and the fact that you don't get cool metaprogramming features. The boilerplate can be reduced with tools like AutoValue. The lack of monkey patching and crazy SFINAE template shenanigans is that it is much easier to look at some piece of code and know what it's calling. You have static types, so you can jump to the method definition reliably (as opposed to Python), and there aren't many subtle syntax features that can trip you up (like lvalue vs rvalue references in C++). You can absolutely make a mess of Java with crazy frameworks, but the fact that the language itself has simple syntax means that nobody else in the organization can do anything too clever.

There is no way you can tell that's valid Common Lisp without actually compiling and executing the code in the json-reader.lisp file. When the compiler gets to (enable-json-syntax), it sees that it is a macro so it executes its code at compile-time. That code then redefines the meaning of the { and [ characters to be the start of JSON objects/arrays (instead of their normal meaning in Common Lisp), and installs code telling Common Lisp how to parse JSON syntax, which is triggered when those characters are encountered in input. The example-object function shows an example of using it. Finally, (disable-json-syntax) is another macro, also executed at compile time, which undoes those changes to the Common Lisp syntax.

Common Lisp did not invent the idea of allowing a program to dynamically alter the language syntax as it was being parsed; I believe the idea was first introduced in Maclisp, and from there spread to other LISP dialects (such as Franz Lisp and Interlisp) before finally being standardised in Common Lisp. The originators of Scheme intentionally decided to leave this feature out, but some implementations/descendants of Scheme have added it back in, such as Racket [1], Guile [2], and Chicken Scheme [3]. Other Lisp-family languages (such as Clojure or Emacs Lisp) have resisted calls to add it, despite encouragement from certain quarters.

Earlier you spoke of "Tcl's lack of a grammar up against Scheme, Lisp", but if runtime-extensible syntax is a form of "lack of a grammar", then many Lisp family languages lack grammar too.

Another language for which this is true (albeit to a significantly lesser degree), is Java. With Java, you can run arbitrary code at compile time by defining an annotation processor. The annotation processor code is run when the annotation is encountered. The annotation processor is allowed to issue compilation errors. It can also generate more source code for additional classes, which gets added to the compilation process, and your program may refer some of those generated classes, and hence need that generated code to compile–for an example see [4] from the Google AutoValue docs, where the "AutoValue_Animal" class being constructed in the create() method is dynamically generated by a processor which is triggered by the @AutoValue annotation. So, if your Java program contains annotations with an associated processor, and if you define "syntactically correct" as "compiles without any errors", then you can't know if the Java program is syntactically correct without executing arbitrary Java code.

[0] https://gist.github.com/chaitanyagupta/9324402

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/Reader_Extension.html

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Reader-E...

[3] https://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Module%20(chicken%20read-synt...

[4] https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...

Reminds me of Google’s AutoValue: https://github.com/google/auto/tree/master/value

Records where you can, and because Lombok is controversial, Immutables is the other alternative (or autovalue). Actually, all code generation tools are fantastic: Immutables, MapStruct, jOOQ...

Via Lombok, yes, which, as of now, is a default plugin in Idea, which everyone is using anyway. If you don't like Lombok particularly (and god knows, I can't imagine why), there is an alternative made by Google called Auto. Or you can use Scala, which has some features like that natively and is 100% interoperable with Java (meaning you can make a new Scala file within the current project and start using it right away). I imagine Kotlin also has some syntax sugar; however, I am not familiar with Kotlin very well.

For immutable value types, AutoValue[1] is a nice library for automating this. Lombok[2] is also popular, but a lot of orgs avoid it because it has some pretty deep dependencies on implementation details of the JDK that aren't guaranteed to be stable across releases. It seems well-maintained in practice, thoguh. Once Java records[3] are out of preview, they will probably be the preferred approach, but it will be a while before most teams are on a version of the JDK that supports them.

For mutable objects, the notion of equality is hairy in general, because what you want often depends on why you'd be comparing the two objects. You might have two mutable objects that can be meaningfully compared in your business logic, but absolutely should not be used as keys in a map. Often you can satisfy your goals by implementing a separate method that does not attempt to conform to the 'equals' contract, which ensures it will not unintentionally be used for e.g. data structure ordering.

[1] https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...

[2] https://projectlombok.org/features/EqualsAndHashCode

[3] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/records-come-to-java

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to secure a Vue.js Web application. We're going to leverage oidc-client-ts to integrate OIDC authentication with the Vue app. The oidc-client-ts package is a well-maintained and used library. It provides a lot of utilities for building out a fully production app.

Keycloak has been a leader in the Identity and Access Management world since its launch almost 8 years ago. It is an open-source offering under the stewardship of Red Hat

It sounds like what you're looking for is an identity provider.

A popular open source option is https://www.keycloak.org/

This application can manage your users, then you can use standards like OpenID or SAML to plug it into your application, of which there are usually many plugins to accomplish this depending on your tech stack.

KeyCloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that offers enterprise IAM solutions. Keycloak emphasizes proficient enterprise authorization solutions by providing:

Outline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth.

[1] https://www.keycloak.org/

> Keycloak was good but has too much legacy for 10+ years.

I got curious, actually seems to check out and explains why it's so well documented (but also complex and oftentimes confusing):

> The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/releases/tag/1.0.0.Fina...

> Don't outsource either your authentication or authorization. Run it in-house.

This is hard to do, though. I hope people here will drop a lot of combinations that work for them!

Personally, for a small/medium scale project, I went with:

Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

It supports various backing RDBMSes (like PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL and others), allows both users that you persist in your own DB, as well as various external sources, like social login across various platforms, is an absolute pain to configure and sometimes acts in stupid ways behind a reverse proxy, but has most of the features that you might ever want, which sadly comes coupled with some complexity and an enterprise feeling.

I quite like that it offers the login/registration views that you need with redirects, as well as user management, storing roles/permissions and other custom attributes. It's on par with what you'd expect and should serve you nicely.

mod_auth_openidc: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc

This one's a certified OpenID Connect Relying Party implementation for... Apache2/httpd.

Some might worry about the performance and there are other options out there (like a module for OpenResty, which is built on top of Nginx), but when coupled with mod_md Apache makes for a great reverse proxy/ingress for my personal needs.

The benefit here is that I don't need 10 different implementations for each service/back end language that's used, I can outsource the heavy lifting to mod_auth_openidc (protected paths, needed roles/permissions, redirect URLs, token renewal and other things) and just read a few trusted headers behind the reverse proxy if further checks are needed, which is easy in all technologies.

That said, the configuration there is also hard and annoying to do, as is working with OpenID Connect in general, even though you can kind of understand why that complexity is inherent. Here's a link with some certified implementations, by the way: https://openid.net/developers/certified-openid-connect-imple...

You couldn't pay me to use their bullshit...if you need an identity server/provider go with Keycloak. Open source, free, and standards based, works better and scales better too.

#docker-compose.yml version: '3' volumes: postgres_data: driver: local services: postgres: container_name: postgres image: postgres:15-alpine restart: unless-stopped volumes: - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./init/db:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ command: postgres -c wal_level=logical ports: - '5433:5432' environment: POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB} POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER} POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD} hasura: container_name: hasura image: hasura/graphql-engine:v2.29.0 restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - postgres # - keycloak ports: - '6080:8080' volumes: - ./hasura/metadata:/hasura-metadata environment: ## postgres database to store Hasura metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_METADATA_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/hasura_metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB} HASURA_GRAPHQL_LOG_LEVEL: warn ## enable the console served by server HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE: 'true' # set to "false" to disable console ## enable debugging mode. It is recommended to disable this in production HASURA_GRAPHQL_DEV_MODE: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLED_LOG_TYPES: startup, http-log, webhook-log, websocket-log, query-log ## enable jwt secret when keycloak realm is ready # HASURA_GRAPHQL_JWT_SECRET: '{ "type": "RS256", "jwk_url": "http://keycloak:8080/realms/development/protocol/openid-connect/certs" }' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET: ${HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET} HASURA_GRAPHQL_UNAUTHORIZED_ROLE: anonymous HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_REMOTE_SCHEMA_PERMISSIONS: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_MIGRATIONS_SERVER_TIMEOUT: 30 # To view tables in Postgres # pgweb: # container_name: pgweb # image: sosedoff/pgweb:latest # restart: unless-stopped # ports: # - '8081:8081' # environment: # - DATABASE_URL=postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?sslmode=disable # depends_on: # - postgres keycloak: container_name: keycloak image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:22.0.5 command: ['start-dev'] # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # command: ['start-dev', '--import-realm'] environment: ## https://www.keycloak.org/server/all-config KEYCLOAK_ADMIN: admin KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD: password123 KC_DB: postgres KC_DB_PASSWORD: postgres_pass KC_DB_USERNAME: postgres KC_DB_SCHEMA: public KC_DB_URL: jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/keycloak_db KC_HOSTNAME: localhost ports: - 8090:8080 depends_on: - postgres # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # volumes: # - ./realm-export.json:/opt/keycloak/data/import/realm.json:ro