In this chapter, we learned about authentication, authorization, and the difference between the two. Remember that it's usually not enough to only do one or the other: most applications that need credentials need a combination of both.
Firebase is a useful cloud storage database that you can use with existing login systems and can not only be useful as a development resource but can also scale to production-level usage. Lastly, remember these points: because JavaScript is client-side, we have to protect sensitive information in different manners than a purely backend application:
- Authenticate and authorize to determine who can use which resources.
- Separate our sensitive data from our public data.
- Never commit keys and sensitive data to a repository!
It's up to all of us to be good digital citizens, but there are bad actors out there. Protect yourself and your code!
In the next chapter, we'll be tying together Node.js and MongoDB to persist our data. We'll...