The term CAPTCHA is actually a contrived acronym, meaning it was chosen deliberately because it is apt for what it is naming. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing [test to tell] Computers [and] Humans Apart. The term was first used by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford in 2003. At its core, CAPTCHAs are a a form of challenge-response test. Sometimes, when trying to access certain portions of a website, you may encounter a CAPTCHA before you are granted access. A test is presented to you, and your entrance to the page is decided…
All about the architecture of modern web applications
The internet has become quite the force in the modern age. While this holds true in more ways than one, its bread and butter is undoubtably the website. So easy it is to take for granted the dynamism of the sites we use every day, but an enormous amount of progress has been made since the days of static webpages. A static webpage means that each time a change should be made, likely due to user interaction, a brand new page must replace the current one. Each page is contained as its…
Accessing a website, any website, is something that most people take for granted, specifically in terms of all the necessary procedures that happen behind the scenes. These procedures make it possible to surf the web quickly and securely. Multiple entities, including your own machine, are utilized to complete this process. Not to mention that all the steps, from the point at which they initialize, to their completion, must occur quickly; very quickly. Fractions of a second separate a functional website, and one deemed to be unusable. These operations are what make the internet, as we know it today, possible.
Have…
Programming and data storage go hand-in-hand. There are many different schools of thought in regards to which data structures are considered to be best. ‘Best’, in this context, usually relates to the time complexity of the structure, or how long it will take the interpreter to either manipulate or locate the individual pieces of data within the storage. Since computers can only run a finite amount of actions, within a set amount of time, efficiency is the ‘name-of-the-game’ when writing code. Efficiency can come in many forms, but in terms of data structures, there are three main concerns when considering…
When a function involves a separate function during its execution, it is known as a higher-order function. This involvement happens in one of two ways: either the original function takes another function as an argument, or it returns another function as its result. This separate function being passed to, or returned from a higher-order function is often referred to as its callback function. The callback function can be written as an anonymous function, directly inside the original function, or it can be initialized to a variable in a separate part of the code and called with its variable name.
Higher-order…