NestJS for Middleware and API Integration for Chrome extension (Part 1)

This is a short article on adopting a middleware for Chrome extension development. This is almost unavoidable especially when building a Saas extension solution. Saas extensions often require the need to integrate with a 3rd party API or secure credentials, the reason being; that Web extensions can be easily reversed-engineered, the last thing you want is sharing your Open AI Key with the world, we’ve seen too many rookie mistakes from these so-called “vibe-coders”.

Beneath are the advantages of adopting a Middleware for Chrome extensions.

Advantages of Middle-wares in Chrome extension

  1. Middleware helps safeguard tokens and credentials from being stolen.

  2. Acts a proxy to 3rd Party API(s) and exchanging data with the extension.

  3. Stripe Integration with Firebase for payment features

  4. Handle authentication and login functionalities

Choosing the right technology for a Middleware / Proxy Service

When choosing the right technology for developing middleware, the requirements are not as complex as you can write this in any language; middleware exists to handle proxy requests from an extension to its destination and back in the format of a rest response.

Middlewares are great for 3rd party integrations with services; an extension that can easily pass information to another system, an instance is an extension that allows you to save personal information to Airtable.

Common languages used for writing middleware:

  1. Java - Spring Boot

  2. Node - ExpressJS, NestJS, NextJS ….. (A lot of frameworks)

  3. Dotnet Core

  4. PHP - Laravel, Symfony or Vanilla PHP

  5. Go, Rust and a lot of other back-end solutions

The Spring boot framework was my initial choice; but after several considerations, I chose the NestJS framework due to the following reasons:

  • NodeJS
  • TypeScript Support
  • Ease of deployment
  • Similarity to Spring boot (DI, Annotations)
  • Digital Ocean App platform support for Node Applications
  • 3rd Party Support for Libraries (TypeORM feels like Spring JPA)
  • DI/Modular Architecture ( Easy to create providers for configs and other libraries)
  • AOP Like Features ( NestJS offers execution before/after on both Controllers and Middlewares, making it easy to create an API Quota)

Why middlewares for Saas applications

As mentioned in the previous posts, middleware offers a great opportunity to safeguard important credentials, track premium users and extend functionalities beyond the client. The following are some of the benefits that Saas extensions can benefit from:

  • API Quota ( Offers an opportunity to track user quota(s) especially when making Open AI calls, once exhausted users can be prompted to refill via Stripe.
  • Authentication
  • Data-Bridge ( Communicate with external services through Proxy requests)
  • Stripe Integration ( Handle user subscription to premium features)
  • Data Extraction and Scrapping ( Sending scrapped information from DOM to API e.g Hubspot, Apollo)

Conclusion

And that’s it, in the next article I will discuss how I used NestJS to develop an API Quota around PicStart API and integrate with the Bubble API to authenticate users for a chrome extension.

Adios

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