jwts in context

One of the projects I enjoyed working on the most was creating a unified concept of a user between three separate applications. In doing so, I learned quite a bit about using JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), but what I never really grasped was why they were the solution. Mariano Calandra’s Why do we need the JSON Web Token (JWT) in the modern web? seeks to fill in that gap by providing the context around the problem JWTs solve.

Specifically, Mariano discusses how the stateless nature of HTTP, the need for authentication/authorization in web applications, and the increasing scale of applications made once viable solutions like Server Side Sessions untenable, paving the way for JWTs.

For further reading, the JWT RFC is full of useful and interesting details.