Authentication for traditional web applications is fairly straight-forward: we send our credentials to the server, a session is created, and a cookie is returned to be saved in the browser. This method works well for round-trip applications, but it isn't a good way to do authentication in modern single page apps, like those built with AngularJS.

In this course we are going to learn about the challenges associated with traditional authentication and how to use what is arguably the best alternative: the JSON Web Token.

Using that knowledge, we'll implement authentication in an AngularJS app that makes calls to an Express API. We'll cover how to address all the challenges associated with keeping a single page application in check when it comes to stateless authentication. This can be a tricky matter since the front end and backend apps are effectively separated, but we'll find out how to leverage our user's JWT to address the challenges.

We'll use Auth0 as an identity and authentication server so that we don't have to roll our own.