Javascript

Building Your First Application with AWS Amplify

Published Sep 19, 2022

Updated Feb 13, 2023

8 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is popular for the cloud solution it provides across the globe, in various regions with data centers.

In this article, we will be looking at a particular platform by AWS for frontend developers, AWS Amplify.

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and features that let web and mobile developers quickly and easily build full-stack applications on AWS.

This article is a summary of JavaScript Marathon: AWS for Frontend Developers with Michael Liendo. If you want a more detailed explanation of building and deploying frontend apps with AWS Amplify, I recommend you go and check out the video!

Application User Flow

Most applications need certain key features to be created for users. Let’s explore a few of them.

User Login:
- This can be created by spinning up an ExpressJS application with Authentication, and handling things like user hashing, password policy, and forgot password.
API integration:
- This is another common need as we typically need to handle user data with a backend application.
Database:
- Most applications store user information. This would be key in creating an interactive user experience in an application.

Bringing these services together can be a lot for many developers. Developers will also have to consider application scalability as the users increase.

AWS Amplify

AWS Amplify is built to specifically handle scale for frontend developers, and also provides the opportunity for an application to scale as the application and users grow. With scalability handled, this allows developers to focus on providing value for their users versus having to worry about scalability at every stage.

AWS Amplify Tools

AWS Amplify tools for building and deploying frontend applications include:

CLI: To connect frontend with AWS backend cloud resources.
UI Components: AWS UI components library is an open-source design system with cloud-connected components and primitives that simplify building accessible, responsive, and beautiful applications.
Hosting Solution: For deploying frontend applications, static sites, and server-side apps, with a CI/CD pipeline.
Amplify Studio: A GUI for UI to plug a Figma component and automatically convert it into a ReactJS component.

Walking back to how AWS will help manage the user journey we listed above and make developer lives easier, here are some of the services provided by AWS that help spin up applications with ease:

User Login: For user login, we can use Amazon Cognito, AWS’s user directory service to handle user authentication, password policies, forgot password, and more.
API: For API access, we can use AWS AppSync, a serverless GraphQL and Pub/Sub API service.
Database: for Database, we can use Amazon’s DynamoDB, which is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database.
Storage: for assets storage, we can be use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Building a Project & Project Setup

Now that you’re familiar with a few of the services we can use to build an application easily, let’s get started and build one together!

Before we start, let’s install the AWS Amplify CLI.

Run:

npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli

This will give us access to use Amplify’s commands for our application.

The Application

We will be building a Next framework application.

This application will be a collection of pictures of Dogs.

To scaffold a Next application, run:

npx create-next-app thisdot-dogs

Now cd into the application directory.

cd thisdot-dogs

Install the packages and dependencies we will be using from AWS:

npm i @aws-amplify/ui-react aws-amplify

Now, open the project in your code editor. We will be using VS Code.

First, we will wrap the root component in an AmplifyProvider component. Open _app.js and replace the code:

import { AmplifyProvider } from '@aws-amplify/ui-react';
import '@aws-amplify/ui-react/style.css';
import '../styles/globals.css'

function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
  return (
    <AmplifyProvider>
      <Component {...pageProps} />
    </AmplifyProvider>
  )
}

export default MyApp

This is to make the application aware of Amplify. We also imported the style library from the React Amplify library.

We will be using the install amplify CLI tool to initialize the Amplify configuration in our project.

To do this, run:

amplify init

You can modify the properties as well, but for this demo, we will leave it as default, and when it asks Initialize the project with the above configuration? we will choose NO.

This is because we will replace the src directory with a . directory and the build directory replace with .next directory.

If you don’t already have AWS credentials set up, Amplify will walk you through setting up new credentials.

For this demo, we will be accepting the default credentials settings provided, but we recommend you follow with the required information for your project. Check out the Documentation to learn more.

AWS will add a few cloud functions and create a configuration file in the project directory, aws-exports.js.

You can add services to your Amplify project by running the amplify add command.

For example, to add the authentication service (AWS Cognito), run:

amplify add auth

This will ask for the type of security configuration you want for the project.

Next, it asks how you want users to authenticate.

This will add authentication to your application. To test it out, let's edit the index.js file and replace the content:

import { withAuthenticator } from "@aws-amplify/ui-react"

function Home() {
  return (
    `Home`
  )
}

export default withAuthenticator(Home)

Now, run the application in dev environment:

npm run dev

Navigate to the dev localhost URL in the browser, http://localhost:3000/.

The landing URL is now authenticated, and requires a username and password to login.

The application now has full authentication with the ability to sign in:

There is a registration function and user detail fields:

There is also a forgotten password function that emails the user a code to reset the password, all from just a few lines of code:

This is a fully functioning application with authentication included locally.

To use the full authentication, we will need to push the application to AWS service.

To do that, run:

amplify push

This will list services created in the application and prompt if you want to continue with the command.

Upon accepting, it will push the application to the cloud and update the amplify-exports.js configuration file with the cloud configuration and AWS services that we enabled in our application.

Now, let's modify the _app.js to apply the Amplify configurations.

Add the Amplify and config imports as follows:

import {Amplify} from 'aws-amplify';
import config from "../amplify-exports.js";

Amplify.configure(config)

function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
…

The authentication configuration handles form validation out-of-the-box including password policy and email, or phone number verification depending on what you choose.

You can view ampliy-exports.js to confirm the configuration options available for the project.

Now to add an API to the application, run:

amplify add api

For this demo, we will choose GraphQL for the API service, API key for authentication, and Amazon Cognito. Everything else will be the default.

Amplify will auto generate the GraphQL schema for the project, which you can modify to fit your use case.

Push the API updates to AWS:

amplify push

Amplify will trigger to generate code for your GraphQL API. We suggest you accept the default options.

Storage

We’ll add a storage service to our project to allow users to upload favorite dog images.

Run:

amplify add storage

You can apply default settings or modify it to fit your use case.

Building a Demo app

Now that we have prepared the project, let’s modify index.js to implement file upload for authenticated users.

import { Button, Card, Flex, Heading, Image, Text, TextField, withAuthenticator } from "@aws-amplify/ui-react"
import { API, Storage } from "aws-amplify"
import { useEffect, useState } from "react"
import { createDogs } from "../src/graphql/mutations"
import { listDogs } from "../src/graphql/queries"

function Home({ signOut }) {
  const [ dogItems, setDogItems ] = useState([])
  const handleOnSubmit = async (e) => {
    e.preventDefault()
    const picTitle = e.target.dogTitle.value
    const dogPicFile = e.target.dogPic.files[ 0 ]
    const dogPicName = dogPicFile.name

    const picData = await Storage.put(dogPicName, dogPicFile, {
      level: 'protected'
    })

    const { data } = await API.graphql({
      query: createDogs,
      variables: {
        input: {
          title: picTitle,
          imageId: dogPicName,

        }
      }
    })
    setDogItems([ data.createDogs, ...dogItems ])
  }

  useEffect(() => {
    async function fetchDogData() {
      const res = await API.graphql({ query: listDogs })

      const dogItems = await Promise.all(
        res.data.listDogs.items.map(async (dogItem) => {
          const dogUrl = await Storage.get(dogItem.imageId, { level: 'protected' })
          return {
            ...dogItem,
            dogUrl
          }
        })
      )

      setDogItems(dogItems)
    }

    fetchDogData()
  }, [])

  return (
    <Flex direction='column' alignItems='center'>
      <Button onClick={signOut}>Sign Out</Button>
      <Heading level={2}>ThisDot Dogs</Heading>
      <form onSubmit={handleOnSubmit}>
        <TextField label='Title' name="dogTitle" placeholder="Enter a dog Title" />
        <TextField type="file" name="dogPic" label="Choose a dog image" />
        <Button variation="primary" type="submit">Submit</Button>
      </form>
      <Flex wrap='wrap' justifyContent="center" >
        {dogItems.map((dogItem) => (
          <Card key={dogItem.id} variation="elevated">
            <Image height={'200px'} width="200px" src={dogItem.dogUrl} alt="hassan" objectFit="contain" />
            <Text>{dogItem.createdAt}</Text>
            <Text>{dogItem.Title}</Text>
          </Card>
        ))}
      </Flex>
    </Flex>
  )
}

export default withAuthenticator(Home)

Walk Through

First, we created a state to hold a list of dogs’ data from the API.

We then declared an async function to handle the form submission.

Using the AWS component library, we loop through the dogItems, rendering each item to display the uploaded image and details of the dog.

We imported the Storage module from amplify, passed dogPicFile to dogPicName for upload, and set the level to protected to give user access only to read and update data.

Then, we imported the API module from amplify, and the destructured data property.

Using the GraphQL code generated for us by amplify when we run amplify add api, we imported createDogs from mutations so we can post form data to the database with GraphQL. We set a new state with the return data from the database.

With React’s useEffect, we declared an async function to fetch data from the database with GraphQL query, and set the state with the returned data, and we call the fetchDogData.

To test the application, run:

npm run dev

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to use AWS Amplify to implement authentication, integrate an API with your frontend application, connect with a database, and also how to store files in AWS storage. This can all be accomplished within a short time, and using very few lines of code.

If you want a more detailed explanation of the content covered in this write up, I recommend you watch the video by JavaScript Marathon: AWS for Frontend Developers with Michael Liendo on This Dot’s YouTube Channel.

What are you planning on building with AWS Amplify?

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

Hassan Sani
@inidaname @inidaname

SSR Finally a First-Class Citizen in Angular?

I am sure you've already heard about server-side rendering (SSR). Generally, it's a technique used to deliver the HTML content generated by the server to the client. The client-side JavaScript framework then hydrates that HTML content to provide a fully interactive application. SSR provides numerous benefits if used correctly, including improved initial load times, better content indexing by search engines, and improved performance on lower-tier devices. Driven by the need for faster, more efficient web applications, with the rise in popularity of Node.js and, thus, server-side JavaScript, SSR has become a de facto standard in modern web development frameworks. At first, SSR was being provided as a part of meta-frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt, or Analog.js. Then, React introduced React Server Components, which marked a significant milestone in the way we think about front-end development. We think of front-end frameworks as being effectively full-stack, and a purely SPA approach is falling out of favor. However, I'm willing to bet that if you're a developer focused mostly on Angular, you may not have heard as much about SSR as your React counterparts. For a long time, Angular has been mostly focused on the SPA approach, and while we had Angular Universal or Analog.js, it was not as widely adopted. And that makes sense, given that Angular was widely regarded as best suited for complex, interactive applications, such as SaaS products or internal company tools, where SEO and initial load times were not as critical as they are for consumer-facing applications. Nevertheless, we have been blessed with the so-called Angular Renaissance, which has, among other things, brought SSR to the forefront of Angular development with the @angular/ssr package. Let's look at what Angular SSR is, how it works, and how you can get started. @angular/ssr The @angular/ssr package is not new; it was written from scratch. It's still Angular Universal. However, it's been pulled into the Angular CLI repository, and the appropriate schematics have been added to make it easier to use. What that means is that you can now add SSR to your Angular application with a single command: ` and you can generate a new SSR application with: ` And to make SSR a first-class citizen, the Angular team is planning to make it the default in the next version. But surely, it's not only rebranding and some CLI commands, you may say. And you're right. You may remember that hydration in Angular Universal has not been optimal as it was destructive and required essentially a complete re-render of the application, thus pretty much negating the benefits of SSR. With the introduction of non-destructive hydration in Angular 16 and its stability in Angular 17, the Angular team has taken a significant step forward in making SSR a first-class citizen. How to Make an SSR-capable Angular Application Let's look at how to use Angular SSR in practice by creating a simple SSR app. First, we need to create a new Angular application with SSR support: ` That will generate a few server-specific files: - server.ts, which is an Express server configured to handle Angular SSR requests by default but can also be extended to handle API routes, or anything else that Express can handle. - src/app/app.config.server.ts provides configuration for the server application similar to your app.config.ts, which defines the configuration for your client application. Both export an instance of ApplicationConfig - src/main.server.ts bootstraps the server application in a similar way to what main.ts does for your client app by calling the bootstrapApplication function. You should have an SSR application ready just like that. You can verify that by running ng serve. The terminal output should show you information about the server bundles generated, and you should be able to see the default app when going to http://localhost:4200. Open the Developer Tools and check the console to see that hydration is enabled. You'll see a message with hydration-related stats, such as the number of components and nodes hydrated. Speaking of hydration... Client Hydration If you open the src/app/app.config.ts in your new SSR application, you'll notice one interesting provider: provideClientHydration(). This provider is crucial for enabling hydration - a process that restores the server-side rendered application on the client. Hydration improves application performance by avoiding extra work to re-create DOM nodes. Angular tries to match existing DOM elements to the application's structure at runtime and reuses DOM nodes when possible. This results in a performance improvement measured using Core Web Vitals statistics, such as reducing the Interaction To Next Paint (INP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Improving these metrics also positively impacts SEO performance. Without hydration enabled, server-side rendered Angular applications will destroy and re-render the application's DOM, which may result in visible UI flicker, negatively impact Core Web Vitals like LCP, and cause layout shifts. Enabling hydration allows the existing DOM to be reused and prevents flickering. Event Replay and Improved Debugging With Angular 18, event replay, a feature that significantly enhances the SSR experience, came into developer preview. Event replay captures user interactions during the SSR phase and replays them once the application is hydrated. This ensures that user actions, such as adding items to a cart, are not lost during the hydration process, providing a seamless user experience even on slow networks. To enable event replay, you can add withEventReplay to your provideClientHydration call: ` Furthermore, Angular 18 takes another step towards making SSR a first-class citizen by enhancing the debugging experience with Angular DevTools. Now, DevTools include overlays and detailed error breakdowns, empowering developers to visualize and troubleshoot hydration issues directly in the browser. Constraints However, hydration imposes a few constraints on your application that are not present without hydration enabled. Your application must have the same generated DOM structure on both the server and the client. The hydration process expects the DOM tree to have the same structure in both environments, including whitespaces and comment nodes produced during server-side rendering. Direct DOM Manipulation The fact that server and client DOM structures must match means that components that manipulate the DOM using native DOM APIs or use innerHTML or outerHTML will encounter hydration errors. The errors are thrown because Angular is unaware of these changes and cannot resolve them during hydration. Examples include accessing the document, querying for specific elements, and injecting additional nodes using appendChild. Detaching DOM nodes and moving them to other locations will also cause errors. Direct DOM manipulation is generally considered bad practice in Angular, so I recommend refactoring your components to avoid it regardless of hydration. However, in warranted cases where refactoring is not feasible, you can use the ngSkipHydration attribute until a hydration-friendly solution can be implemented. You can use it directly in a template: ` or as a host binding: ` > Note: The ngSkipHydration attribute forces Angular to skip hydrating the entire component and its children. So use this attribute carefully, as, for example, applying it to your root application component would effectively disable hydration for the entire application. Valid HTML Structure Another constraint is that invalid HTML structures in component templates can result in DOM mismatch errors during hydration. Common issues include: - without a - inside a - inside an - inside another Again, if you have an invalid HTML, you should fix this regardless of hydration. If you are unsure about your HTML's validity, you can use the W3 validator to check it. Zoneless apps or custom Zone.js Hydration relies on a signal from Zone.js when it becomes stable. Custom or "noop" Zone.js implementations may thus disrupt the timing of this event, triggering the serialization or cleanup process too early or too late. This configuration is not yet fully supported. While Zoneless is already available in developer preview and we could assume this issue will be resolved when it lands as stable, there is no explicit ETA mentioned in the official roadmap. I18n One of the biggest blockers for adoption of client hydration was the lack of support for internationalization with hydration. By default, Angular 17 skipped hydration for components that used i18n blocks, re-rendering them from scratch. In Angular 18, however, hydration for i18n blocks got into developer preview. To enable hydration for i18n blocks, you can add withI18nSupport to your provideClientHydration call. ` Third-Party Libraries with DOM Manipulation The last thing to consider is third-party libraries that manipulate DOM, such as D3 charts. They could cause DOM mismatch errors when hydration is enabled. You can use the ngSkipHydration attribute to skip hydration for components rendered using these libraries. Conclusion The Angular team has been doing great work to make the framework more modern and competitive, hearing the community feedback and adjusting the roadmap accordingly. And SSR is an excellent example of that. With the introduction of non-destructive hydration in Angular 16 and making it stable in Angular 17, the Angular team has taken a significant step forward in making SSR a first-class citizen in Angular. The @angular/ssr package is now part of the Angular CLI, making adding SSR to your Angular application easier. The Angular team plans to make SSR the default in the next version, further solidifying its position in the Angular ecosystem. However, as with any new feature, there are some constraints and best practices to follow when using SSR with Angular. You should be aware of hydration's limitations and ensure your application is compatible with it. However, if you follow the guidelines provided by the Angular team, you should be able to take advantage of the benefits of SSR without any significant issues....

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8 mins

AngularJavaScriptExpress.js

Exploring Angular Forms: A New Alternative with Signals

Exploring Angular Forms: A New Alternative with Signals In the world of Angular, forms are essential for user interaction, whether you're crafting a simple login page or a more complex user profile interface. Angular traditionally offers two primary approaches: template-driven forms and reactive forms. In my previous series on Angular Reactive Forms, I explored how to harness reactive forms' power to manage complex logic, create dynamic forms, and build custom form controls. A new tool for managing reactivity - signals - has been introduced in version 16 of Angular and has been the focus of Angular maintainers ever since, becoming stable with version 17. Signals allow you to handle state changes declaratively, offering an exciting alternative that combines the simplicity of template-driven forms with the robust reactivity of reactive forms. This article will examine how signals can add reactivity to both simple and complex forms in Angular. 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This approach offers a more declarative way to manage form state and reactivity, combining the simplicity of template-driven forms with the power of signals. You may be tempted to define the form directly as an object inside a signal. While such an approach may seem more concise, typing into the individual fields does not dispatch reactivity updates, which is usually a deal breaker. Here’s an example StackBlitz with a component suffering from such an issue: Therefore, if you'd like to react to changes in the form fields, it's better to define each field as a separate signal. By defining each form field as a separate signal, you ensure that changes to individual fields trigger reactivity updates correctly. Example 2: A Complex Form with Signals You may see little benefit in using signals for simple forms like the login form above, but they truly shine when handling more complex forms. 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In the complex form example, the formValid signal ensures that all required fields are filled and validates the email and phone numbers format. This approach to validation is a bit simple and needs to be better connected to the actual form fields. While it will work for many use cases, in some cases, you might want to wait until explicit "signal forms" support is added to Angular. Tim Deschryver started implementing some abstractions around signal forms, including validation and wrote an article about it. Let's see if something like this will be added to Angular in the future. Why Use Signals in Angular Forms? The adoption of signals in Angular provides a powerful new way to manage form state and reactivity. Signals offer a flexible, declarative approach that can simplify complex form handling by combining the strengths of template-driven forms and reactive forms. Here are some key benefits of using signals in Angular forms: 1. 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AngularJavaScript

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AngularReact

Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation

Building a Stripe App: A Step-by-Step Guide to QR Code Generation Why Build a Stripe App? I recently participated in an audio space with the Stripe team, and something they said really stuck with me: the Stripe app store is a growing area that isn't overly saturated yet. There's a lot of potential for new apps, and companies can use this opportunity to grow. I work at a company called This Dot Labs, and we've created several Stripe apps and even own one. After looking at the data, I can confirm that the Stripe team was right! Creating a QR Code Generator App For this tutorial, we'll build a QR code app that can take a URL and generate a code for it. This is a good use case to help you understand the ins and outs of Stripe's developer tools. Why QR Codes? QR codes are useful tools that have become common in e-commerce, restaurants, and other industries. While Stripe already has a QR code tool, we'll make our own to familiarize ourselves with their syntax and problem-solving approaches. Project Structure Before we dive into the implementation, let's look at the structure of our Stripe App QR Code project: * .vscode: Contains settings for Visual Studio Code * source/views: Holds the main application views * .gitignore: Specifies files to ignore in version control * stripe-app.json: Defines the Stripe app configuration * ui-extensions.d.ts: TypeScript declaration file for UI extensions * .build: this is where the built Stripe app gets placed. Step-by-Step Implementation 1\. Install Stripe Locally First, you need to install Stripe on your local machine. The documentation provides great instructions for this: * For Mac users: Use Brew to install * For Windows users: Download the package and add it to your environment variables You can find the details here in the stripe docs to install the Stripe CLI https://docs.stripe.com/stripe-cli When using Windows, you must do stripe login from Powershell, NOT from Git bash or any other tool. After the server is up, then you can continue using git bash for everything else. After stripe login, you need to enter stripe apps start. Once you do that, the server is up and running and you can go back to using git bash or any other tool. 2\. Install Dependencies We'll be using an extra package for QR code generation. Install it using npm: ` 3\. Set Up the Main Component Let's look at the home.tsx file, where we'll use Stripe's UI components: ` These components are similar to other UI libraries like Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS. 4\. Create the UI Structure Our app will have: * An input field for the URL * Validation using a regex pattern * Error handling for invalid URLs * QR code generation and display Here is the Home.tsx file that is located in the src/views folder ` * ContextView` is at the top level of the app where we see the Title and the link to the Stripe Docs that we placed in our Context View. * Box is how you use Divs. * Banners can be used to show notification errors or any other item you wish to display. * Textfields are input fields. * Everything else is pretty self-explanatory. 5\. Handle Content Security Policy One problem I personally ran into was when I tried to redirect users, the Stripe policies would block it since I did not express that I knew what it was doing. I had to go into the stripe-app.json file and mention the specific security policies. For this particular exercise, I kept these as null. This is my stripe-app.json file. ` 6\. Configure App Views As you can see here, the stripe-app.json file shows the views for each file I have. The Home.tsx file and the Invoice.tsx are also included This is our way of saying that for each view we have, show the app functionality on that page. Our stripe-app.json file will show it but also, the manifest.js file in our .build folder will also show the same. Any view that doesn't have a file will not show the application's functionality. So, if I were to go to transactions, the app would not show the same logic as the home or invoices page. By following these steps, you'll have a fully functional QR code generator app for Stripe. This is just a simple example, but the potential for Stripe apps is massive, especially for businesses serving e-commerce customers. If you need help or get stuck, don't hesitate to reach out, danny.thompson@thisdot.co. The Stripe team is also very active in answering questions, so leverage them as a resource. Happy coding!...

Dec 18, 2024

4 mins

stripe

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