Nicolas Fränkel

Last week, I read a post about Kotlin code analysis, thanks to the Kyiv Kotlin UG. I stumble upon a lot of similar posts: they show how to hack into the build to produce a text report showing quality issues. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I claim this is not proper software engineering. It’s a one-time hack: it has no value over the long term. Code quality is a serious subject, and should be treated accordingly. First, it needs to be evaluated, then issues have to be stored and compare

Last week was the release of Oracle’s GraalVM. As stated on the website: GraalVM is a universal virtual machine for running applications written in JavaScript, Python 3, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, and LLVM-based languages such as C and C++. GraalVM removes the isolation between programming languages and enables interoperability in a shared runtime. It can run either standalone or in the context of OpenJDK, Node.js, Oracle Database, or MySQL. There are several fac

Some years ago, I discovered the Spring Boot actuator: Spring Boot includes a number of additional features to help you monitor and manage your application when it’s pushed to production. You can choose to manage and monitor your application using HTTP endpoints, with JMX or even by remote shell (SSH or Telnet). Auditing, health and metrics gathering can be automatically applied to your application. To sum it up, the actuator offers endpoints that allow monitoring of the application from

Spring Boot is a huge success, perhaps even more so than its inceptors hoped for. There is a lot of documentation, blog posts, and presentations on Spring Boot. However, most of them are aimed toward a feature, like monitoring or configuring. Few - if any of them, describe real-world practices. In this post, I’d like to highlight how to design a Spring Boot having multiple modules.

When I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll, I was faced with the problem of letting users search content in it. I didn’t give it much thought and used Google Custom Search Engine. In this post, I’d like to review possible options to search static sites, and review each of them.

I use Git a lot, in my daily job as well as for this blog. When using it, I often rebase locally before pushing, to have a clean and readable history. A sample workflow For my blog, the branching model looks like the following: o---o---o---o master \ \---o---o feature/newposts master As expected, this branch is the production site. feature/newposts The branch is dedicated for new posts. There’s one post per commit. Also, to speed up renderi

When I started working as a developer - a long time ago, we were under constant supervision. For example, one had to ask the architects team for every new library. I remember one of the "official" library was iText, probably because reimplementing its features was deemed to expensive. Yet, though Struts was available, we had our own MVC framework. Just like any other company at this time. Since that time, a lot has changed. The Apache Web Server has become ubiquitous, even though some

Despite what a lot of conference talks might lead you to think, far from every Java developer uses Docker on a daily basis, if at all. However, chances are high they work with a couple of different Java versions. To handle that requirement, the easy approach is to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable when necessary. But you have to remember the path to the required Java version every time you need to change.

Today, I’d like to tackle a subject that seems to be misunderstood by a sizable fraction of developers, the lifecycle of features. Suppose you design a language, a framework, a library, anything that is provided to third-partys. Because you did a good job, this software is now widely used.

I’m a big fan of Baeldung’s blog. One of his latest post is about casting in Java. Unfortunately, I feel it misses one important point: dynamic casting. Since that’s is (very) relatively new, this post will try to fill that gap.