Give me one!

When starting an application from scratch, the fundamental question of what features should I build first? will inevitably arise. For some, the answer might be ROI! First to market! Customer needs! Well, for me, it's simply about building something fun . Yes, fun . This is my blog, and I don't particularly care if a feature is meaningful, as long as I have fun implementing it. 😊

With that said, here is the 👍 feature that I particularly enjoyed creating.

What I don't want is for my blog to feel cumbersome for visitors. I want a safe place where I can share my thoughts, while also being inclusive—a space where people can easily provide feedback. The challenge, however, is that if there are no validations, such functionalities may become vulnerable to bots, making them meaningless in no time.

The first step is, consequently, to mitigate the risk of fraud and fake votes. I decided to use reCAPTCHA v3 , which, unlike v2, is fully transparent and does not require human intervention (e.g. puzzle solving). While there are limitations to using this service, I don’t expect heavy traffic, nor do I care if botnets decide to DDoS my tiny personal blog. The use of reCAPTCHA will most likely be extended to other features in the future, such as the ability to react (comment or reply) to blog posts.

The second challenge is user identification. If there’s no registration involved, how can I persist the fact that someone liked a post? There are probably various ways to solve this puzzle, but one elegant solution is to consider the browser as the lowest common denominator.

The first step is to generate some kind of session ID (UUID) to identify the visitor. This ID is then passed down to the browser and expected back in subsequent calls. Does that ring a bell? Yes, cookies ! That’s exactly what they’re made for. 🍪

In order to guarantee that a session (a cookie 🍪) exists Quarkus as the notion of RouteFilter .

                @RouteFilter(100)
public void sessionRouteFilter(RoutingContext  ctx) {

	var session = Cookies.findSessionCookie(ctx.request());
	if (session.isEmpty()) {
		ctx.response().addCookie(Cookies.createSessionCookie());
	}

	ctx.next();
}
                

When a visitor likes a post, the session ID (UUID) is first extracted from the cookie and then persisted in the blog_post_rating(id, user_id) SQL table. Each entry simply represents a like. And there you have it—easy as lemon squeezy! 🍋🍸

The final concern was choosing a database provider. This project is hosted on Oracle Cloud , but their pricing for a cloud SQL database is far beyond my expense limit for this project. I explored various free alternatives that would offer enough flexibility for my current needs, and provide affordable paid tiers for scalability if necessary.

I went for aiven.io , which not only provides a free tier that perfectly fits my requirements but is also incredibly user-friendly.

This project is publicly accessible on my github

and ... don't forget to leave a thumbs up 🙃.