A New Okta Blog for Developers
We joke that ‘there’s an app for that’ for nearly everything you can think of today (and some things you probably haven’t thought of yet) – but the numbers don’t lie. Apple announced that there were more than 1.4 million apps in the App Store as of January 2015. There were more than 9 million registered developers by Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference last year, up 47% from the year before, and two-thirds of the developers attending the event were there for the first time.
And that’s just Apple.
It’s a truly remarkable time. With the unprecedented efficiencies of cloud computing and the massive adoption of mobile devices, it’s not just consumer-facing apps that are exploding in number. Companies of all sizes and in all verticals are building applications to engage customers, share information with partners and automate business processes. With this growing array of SaaS and corporate applications comes a growing need to efficiently and securely manage access and to make access easy for users on every device. And we’re here to help.
Today, we’re excited to announce a brand new Okta blog just for developers — a warm, well-lit home for technical topics ranging from all things identity, to dispatches from the Okta Engineering Team on building cloud services, to tips for developers building with the Okta Platform.
From where we sit, we see that established paradigms for identity and access management don’t work for our new world outside the firewall; and, fortunately, we find ourselves in a realm of significant and rapid innovation in methods for authentication and authorization. Less than two years ago Apple announced the first biometric authentication on a mobile phone, and in the first quarter of 2015 alone they sold 74.5 million iPhones, the most popular of which was the TouchID-enabled iPhone 6. New standards like OpenID Connect are gaining adoption, yet the installed base for older protocols like SAML is large and entrenched. There is a lot of work to do to both harness the full potential of the newest inventions in IAM – and to invent solutions that address the needs of developers, companies and end users.
We also know that engineers value tactical, code-driven solutions. So, in this light, we wanted to create a forum for deep technical discussions that enables engineers to share processes for building for a cloud and mobile world with these new tools and frameworks. We’ve already started sharing insights into Android Unit Testing, Productionalizing ActiveMQ and general engineering design principles – and we’ll be digging in more over the coming months.
Have something top of mind you’d like to discuss with our engineering community? Join in on the conversation by submitting questions, topics and guest posts to [email protected], and be sure to stay tuned for more updates at developer.okta.com/blog.