What’s a Reverse Proxy

If you’re like me, the word “proxy” is an overloaded term. In different contexts, the word proxy means something different to different people. In this case, I’m talking about a server that’s an intermediary between the caller and the receiver of a networking call (usually HTTP or similar). Before you can understand a reverse proxy, let’s talk about forward proxies (or proxy servers, as you might be familiar with).

A proxy server is a server that takes requests and re-executes the call to the Internet (or intranet) on behalf of the original caller. This can be used for caching requests to improve speed of execution or for filtering content (as well as other reasons). In Figure 1, you can see a typical proxy server diagram.

Proxy server

A reverse proxy is very much like a proxy server, but, not too surprisingly, in reverse. Instead of intercepting calls going outside the Internet/intranet, a reverse proxy intercepts calls from the outside and forwards them to local servers. Often the proxy server is the only accessible server in this scenario. If you look at Figure 2, you can see that all calls come into the reverse proxy. Often the caller has no idea that there’s a reverse proxy.

Reverse proxy

Now that you have a general idea of what a reverse proxy is, let’s talk about the why of reverse proxies.

Do I Need a Reverse Proxy?

Many projects have no need for a reverse proxy. You should learn about them anyway, because it’s another arrow in your development quiver to use when you need it. The use-case for using a reverse proxy is fairly well defined. The reverse proxy can be used in microservice scenarios where you don’t want individual clients to know about the naming or topology of your data center.

Reverse proxies are not only helpful in those microservices projects. Here are some other reasons to use a reverse proxy:

  • Service gatekeeping
  • Load balancing
  • SSL termination
  • Security
  • URL writing

Although you might want to use a reverse proxy for all of these reasons, you don’t need all of these services. Use a reverse proxy in the way your application works. You can use reverse proxies as a product (e.g., CloudFlare) or built into your own projects.

The most obvious use-case for many of you reading this article is to use a reverse proxy to provide an API gateway for microservices. A reverse proxy can expose a server that represents a single surface area for requests. The details of how the service is implemented and where the actual service resides are made opaque to the actual clients. This is what I call service aggregation. In this case, a reverse proxy is used to accept calls from clients and then pass them off to the underlying service (or cluster of services). This allows you to change the composition of the microservice without breaking clients.

Here is the list of reverse proxies;

Traefik Labs

YARP – Yet Another Proxy – Microsoft open source

For YARP, you can read more here on code magazine

You can read more about Microservices here;

Hidden / Invisible Characters

Windows 98 had some tricks using ALT+some integer to add invisible characters. These are normally called  Control Characters.

The control characters U+0000–U+001F and U+007F come from ASCII. Additionally, U+0080–U+009F were used in conjunction with ISO 8859 character sets (among others). They are specified in ISO 6429 and often referred to as C0 and C1 control codes respectively. Most of these characters play no explicit role in Unicode text handling. The characters U+0000 , U+0009 (HT), U+000A (LF), U+000D (CR), and U+0085 (CR+LF) are commonly used in text processing as formatting characters.

This is how we can identify and remove them in a string;

string input; // this is your input string
string output = new string(input.Where(c => !char.IsControl(c)).ToArray());
Console.write(output.Trim());

For testing,

Excel can be used.

Click on the Cell where you want to add character. Click Insert -> Symbols;

Select “Basic Latin” in Subset and add empty space;

This will add a special character in selected cell before or after the value depending on the position.

Notepad++ is another alternative and can be used to add special characters in a string.

  1. Go to Edit > Character Panel to show the ASCII Insertion Panel.
  2. Put the cursor where you want to insert the character.
  3. Double-click the character (in the Character column) to insert.

For more info on NotePad++ special character handling, click here.

JavaScript: How to construct an array of json objects using map

What does map do ?

Answer: It creates a new array with the results of calling a function on every element in the calling array.

Example:

var numbers = [ 1, 2, 3, 4];
var multiplesOfTen = numbers.map( function(num) {
    return num * 10;
});
console.log(numbers); //prints [1, 2, 3, 4]
console.log(multiplesOfTen); //prints [10, 20, 30, 40]

How does JSON object look like?

Answer: JSON objects are written as key/ value pairs

Example:

var Person = { "name" : "Amy", "Age" : 15 }
console.log(Person.Age); //Prints 15

Let us solve a problem using map method. We have a JSON object say “orders” with lot of keys like name, description, date, status. We need an array of orders whose status is delivered. This array of orders will have information about order name and order description only.

Answer:

var orders = [ { "name" : "chain", "description" : "necklace chain", "status": "shipped"} , {"name": "pen", "description" : "ball pen", "status": "shipped"}, {"name": "book", "description" : "travel diary", "status": "delivered"},{"name": "brush", "description" : "paint brush", "status": "delivered"}];
console.log(orders); 
var orderInfo = orders.map( function(order) {
 if( order.status === "delivered"){
     var info = { "orderName": order.name,
                  "orderDesc": order.description
                 }
     return info;
 }
});
console.log(orderInfo);

Reference

https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_objects.asp

Method vs Linq based query syntax example

I need to make inner join on 3 tables; LedgerTypes, LedgerControl and Ledger.

Method based query example

//method based query
            
// your starting point - table in the "from" statement
var list = LedgerTypes
  //the source table of the inner join
  .Join(LedgerControl,
     //primary key (first part of sql "join" statement)
     t => t.Id,
     //foreign key (the second part of the "on" clause)
     lc => lc.ControllerTypeId, 
  (t, lc) => new { t, lc })   //new join
  // third table in the join clause
  .Join(Ledger, 
    //third table foreign key
    tc => tc.lc.Id, 
    //second table primary key
    l => l.ControllerID, 
  (tc, l) => new { tc, l })
      .Select(result => new {          //selection
       LedgerTypeId = result.tc.t.Id,
       LedgerTypeName = result.tc.t.ControllerTypeName,
       LedgerControlId = result.tc.lc.Id,
       LedgerControlName = result.tc.lc.ControllerCodeFullName,
       LedgerId = result.tc.lc.Id,
       LedgerName = result.tc.lc.ControllerCodeFullName
       // other assignments
});

Linq based query example

 //linq based query
var list = from t in LedgerTypes
    join lc in LedgerControl on t.Id equals lc.ControllerTypeId
    join l in Ledger on lc.Id equals l.ControllerID
    select new
       {
             LedgerTypeId = t.Id,
             LedgerTypeName = t.ControllerTypeName,
             LedgerControlId = lc.Id,
             LedgerControlName = lc.ControllerCodeFullName,
             LedgerId = l.Id,
             LedgerName = l.LedgerCodeFullName
            // other assignments
       };

I prefer query syntax because it’s readable and maintainable.

Resources

For more info read here and here

Delete a local git branch

How to delete a Test_Branch.

Switch to some other branch and delete Test_Branch, as follows:

$ git checkout master
$ git branch -d Test_Branch

If above command gives you error – The branch 'Test_Branch' is not fully merged. If you are sure you want to delete it and still you want to delete it, then you can force delete it using -D instead of -d, as:

$ git branch -D Test_Branch

To delete Test_Branch from remote as well, execute:

git push origin --delete Test_Branch

Check the link for more info.