The feed providers feature in the Windows App SDK is a new integration point for third-party applications. It enables these applications to register their content feeds to be directly available within the Windows Widgets Board, enhancing the user experience by providing quick access to a variety of content directly from the desktop.

This article introduces the concept of feed providers and provides a high-level explanation the feature. Detailed implementation guidance will be published in a future update.

Feeds in the Widgets Board helps users stay on top of what matters, enabling them to easily discover useful information and empowering them to act on it. Feed providers enable users to see content from multiple apps and services at the same time. Users can access content from various apps directly on their Widgets Board without the need to open individual apps, ensuring they have the latest information at their fingertips. Users also have the control to enable or disable feeds from the Widgets Board settings, tailoring the content to their preferences.

TypeSpec is a language and toolset developed by Microsoft for defining data models and service APIs. It provides a structured way to describe the shape and behavior of data and services, ensuring consistency and reducing errors in API development. With TypeSpec, you can generate code, documentation, and other artifacts from your API definitions, making it easier to maintain and evolve your services. Microsoft uses TypeSpec internally to define APIs for various products and services, including Azure

TypeSpec is used to define the interface of your API, which clients will use to interact with resources provided by your service. This includes specifying the operations, request and response models, and error handling mechanisms. The actual API logic is implemented in the backend service, which processes the requests and communicates with the database.

Nowadays, it’s pretty much expected that software comes with an HTTP API interface. Every programming language out there offers a way to expose APIs or make GET/POST/PUT requests, including R. In this post, I’ll show you how to create an API using the plumber package. Plus, I’ll give you tips on how to make it more production ready - I’ll tackle scalability, statelessness, caching, and load balancing. You’ll even see how to consume your API with other tools like python, curl, and the R own httr package

# When an API is started it might take some time to initialize # this function stops the main execution and wait until # plumber API is ready to take queries. wait_for_api <- function(log_path, timeout = 60, check_every = 1) { times <- timeout / check_every for(i in seq_len(times)) { Sys.sleep(check_every) if(any(grepl(readLines(log_path), pattern = "Running plumber API"))) { return(invisible()) } } stop("Waiting timed!") }

Oh, in some examples I am using redis. So, before you dive in, make sure to fire up a simple redis server. At the end of the script, I’ll be turning redis off, so you don’t want to be using it for anything else at the same time. I just want to remind you that this code isn’t meant to be run on a production server.

redis is launched in a background, , so you might want to wait a little bit to make sure it’s fully up and running before moving on.

wait_for_redis <- function(timeout = 60, check_every = 1) { times <- timeout / check_every for(i in seq_len(times)) { Sys.sleep(check_every) status <- suppressWarnings(system2("redis-cli", "PING", stdout = TRUE, stderr = TRUE) == "PONG") if(status) { return(invisible()) } } stop("Redis waiting timed!") }

First off, let’s talk about logging. I try to log as much as possible, especially in critical areas like database accesses, and interactions with other systems. This way, if there’s an issue in the future (and trust me, there will be), I should be able to diagnose the problem just by looking at the logs alone. Logging is like “print debugging” (putting print(“I am here”), print(“I am here 2”) everywhere), but done ahead of time. I always try to think about what information might be needed to make a correct diagnosis, so logging variable values is a must. The logger and glue packages are your best friends in that area.

Next, it might also be useful to add a unique request identifier ((I am doing that in setuuid filter)) to be able to track it across the whole pipeline (since a single request might be passed across many functions). You might also want to add some other identifiers, such as MACHINE_ID - your API might be deployed on many machines, so it could be helpful for diagnosing if the problem is associated with a specific instance or if it’s a global issue.

In general you shouldn’t worry too much about the size of the logs. Even if you generate ~10KB per request, it will take 100000 requests to generate 1GB. And for the plumber API, 100000 requests generated in a short time is A LOT. In such scenario you should look into other languages. And if you have that many requests, you probably have a budget for storing those logs:)

It might also be a good idea to setup some automatic system to monitor those logs (e.g. Amazon CloudWatch if you are on AWS). In my example I would definitely monitor Error when reading key from cache string. That would give me an indication of any ongoing problems with API cache.

Speaking of cache, you might use it to save a lot of resources. Caching is a very broad topic with many pitfalls (what to cache, stale cache, etc) so I won’t spend too much time on it, but you might want to read at least a little bit about it. In my example, I am using redis key-value store, which allows me to save the result for a given request, and if there is another requests that asks for the same data, I can read it from redis much faster.

Note that you could use memoise package to achieve similar thing using R only. However, redis might be useful when you are using multiple workers. Then, one cached request becomes available for all other R processes. But if you need to deploy just one process, memoise is fine, and it does not introduce another dependency - which is always a plus.

info <- function(req, ...) { do.call( log_info, c( list("MachineId: {MACHINE_ID}, ReqId: {req$request_id}"), list(...), .sep = ", " ), envir = parent.frame(1) ) }

#* Log some information about the incoming request #* https://www.rplumber.io/articles/routing-and-input.html - this is a must read! #* @filter setuuid function(req) { req$request_id <- UUIDgenerate(n = 1) plumber::forward() }

#* Log some information about the incoming request #* @filter logger function(req) { if(!grepl(req$PATH_INFO, pattern = "PATH_INFO")) { info( req, "REQUEST_METHOD: {req$REQUEST_METHOD}", "PATH_INFO: {req$PATH_INFO}", "HTTP_USER_AGENT: {req$HTTP_USER_AGENT}", "REMOTE_ADDR: {req$REMOTE_ADDR}" ) } plumber::forward() }

To run the API in background, one additional file is needed. Here I am creating it using a simple bash script.

library(plumber) library(optparse) library(uuid) library(logger) MACHINE_ID <- "MAIN_1" PORT_NUMBER <- 8761 log_level(logger::TRACE) pr("tmp/api_v1.R") %>% pr_run(port = PORT_NUMBER)

Schema driven data validation​ We follow Swagger spec as a standard to validate the schema of the event, whether incoming or outgoing events (HTTP), without developer having to write any code. In case of database API calls, the datastore plugin validates the arguments based on the DB model specified in Prisma format. The plugins for HTTP APIs or datastores offer validation for third-party API requests and responses, datastore queries, and incoming events based on Swagger spec or DB schema. For more intricate validation scenarios, such as conditional validation based on attributes like subject, object, environment, or payload, developers can incorporate these rules into the application logic as part of middleware or workflows.

Unified datastore model and API​ The unified model configuration and CRUD API, which includes popular SQL, NoSQL stores including Elasticgraph (a unique ORM over Elasticsearch), offer standardized interfaces to various types of datastores, whether SQL or NoSQL. Each integration adapts to the nature of the data store. The Prisma and Elasticgraph plugins provided by Godspeed expose the native functions of the client used, giving developer the freedom to use the universal syntax or native queries.

Authentication​ Authentication helps to identify who is the user, and generate their access tokens or JWT token for authorized access to the resources of the application. The framework gives developers full freedom to setup any kind of authentication. For ex. they can setup simple auth using the microservice's internal datastore. Or they can invoke an IAM service like ORY Kratos, AWS Okta, or an inhouse service. They can also add OAUTH2 authentication using different providers like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Github etc. using pre-built plugins, or import and customize an existing HTTP plugin like Express, by adding PassportJS middleware.

Authorization​ Authorization is key to security, for multi-tenant or variety of other use cases. The framework allows neat, clean and low code syntax to have a fine grained authorization in place, at the event level or workflow's task level, when querying a database or another API. Developers define authorization rules for each event or workflow task using straightforward configurations for JWT validation or RBAC/ABAC. For more complex use cases, for ex. where they query a policy engine and dynamically compute the permissions, they can write workflows or native functions to access the datasources, compute the rules on the fly, and patch the outcome of that function into a task's authz parameter. These rules encompass not only access to API endpoints but also provide fine-grained data access within datastores, for table, row and column level access. The framework allows seamless integration with third-party authorization services or ACL databases via the datasource abstraction.

Autogenerated Swagger spec​ Following the principles of Schema Driven Development, the event spec of the microservice can be used to auto-generate the Swagger spec for HTTP APIs exposed by this serice. The framework provides autogenerated Swagger documentation using CLI.

Autogenerated CRUD API​ The framework provides autogenereated CRUD APIs from database model written in Prisma format. Generated API's can be extended by the developers as per their needs. We are planning auto generate or Graphql and gRpc APIs, and may release a developer bountry for the same soon.

Environment variables and configurations​ The framework promites setting up of environment variables in a pre-defined YAML file. Though the developer can also allow access by other means via a .env file or setting them up manually. Further configurations are to be written in /config folder. These variables are accessible in Other configuration files Datasource, event source and event definitions Workflows

Log redaction​ The framework allows developer to specify the keys that may have sensitive information and should never get published in logs by mistake. There is a centralized check for such keys before a log is about to be printed.

Telemetry autoinstrumentation using OTEL​ Godspeed allows a developer to add auto-instrumentation which publishes logs, trace and APM information in OTEL standard format, supported by all major observability backends. The APM export captures not just the RAM, CPU information per node/pod/service, but also the latency information of the incoming API calls, with broken down spans giving breakup of latency across the calls to datastores or external APIs. This helps to find out exact bottlenecks. Further the logs and trace/spans are correlated to find out exactly where the error happened in a request spanning multiple microservices with each calling multiple datasources and doing internal computation. Developer can also add custom logging, span creation and BPM metrics at task level. For ex. new user registration, failed login attempt etc.

First, if the application is for devs and I need something very quick, I would just use GitHub OAuth. Done in 10 minutes.

Now to the main part - how would I implement password-based auth? The minimum for me would be password with 2FA using authenticator apps. Passkeys aren’t widespread enough and I just find magic-links annoying.

Always implement rate-limiting, even if it’s something very basic!

Session management

Database sessions 100%. I really, really don’t like JWTs and they shouldn’t be used as sessions majority of times.

Assuming I only have to deal with authenticated sessions, my preferred approach is 30 days expiration but the expiration gets extended every time the session is used. This ensures active users stay authenticated while inactive users are signed out.

Registration

Hot take - I think it’s fine for apps to share whether an email exists in their system or not. If the email is already taken, just tell the user that they already have an account. Significantly better UX for minimal security loss. Don’t use emails for auth if you don’t like that.

Anyway, something more important than preventing user enumeration is checking passwords against previous leaks. The haveibeenpwned.com API is probably the best option for this. This will reduce the effectiveness of credential stuffing attacks, where an attacker targets accounts using leaked passwords from other websites.

Passwords are hashed with either Argon2id or Scrypt - they’re both good enough. Bcrypt is ok but it unfortunately has a 50-70 character limit.

Rate limiting will be set to around 1 attempt per second per IP address. Captchas if I start to get spams.

Email verification

I would also check if the email starts or ends with a space just to make sure the user didn’t mistype it.

I personally prefer OTPs for email verification over links, but both work fine. For OTPs, a basic throttling like 5-10 attempts per hour per account should be good enough. The code will be valid for 10, maybe 15 minutes. For verification links, I’d set the expiration to 2 hours.

Here’s some ways I would generate those OTPs: bytes := make([]byte, 5) rand.Read(bytes) // 8 characters, 40 bits of entropy // I might use a custom character set to remove 1, I, 0, and O. otp := base32.StdEncoding.EncodeToString(bytes) // 8 characters, entropy equivalent to ~26 bits // This introduces a tiny bias. // See RFC 4226 for why this is fine. bytes := make([]byte, 4) rand.Read(bytes) num := int(binary.BigEndian.Uint32(bytes) % 100000000) otp := fmt.Sprintf("%08d", num)

First of all, I wouldn’t bother with those 100 character long regex. Here’s the only email regex you’ll ever need: ^.+@.+\..+$