Web Coding & Development All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 4

Managing App Users

IN THIS CHAPTER

Setting up your app’s user class

Creating new user accounts

Signing users in and out of the web app

Handling forgotten passwords

Managing user accounts flexibly and securely

The craft of programming begins with empathy, not formatting or languages or tools or algorithms or data structures.

— KENT BECK

If your web app enables users to create data items, then those users will come with the more than reasonable expectation that your web app will preserve that data. The simplest web apps honor that expectation by saving user data locally in the web browser, a topic that I talk about in Book 8, Chapter 1. However, your users might also come with the further expectation that their data should be available to them no matter which device or web browser they happen to be using. This level of expectation is certainly still reasonable, but it’s considerably more complex because now you’re in the realm of managing user accounts on the server. This ...