Nicolas Fränkel

Last week, we set up a new project using the YAML flavor of Polyglot Maven. Now is time for some server-side code! As a long time Vaadin advocate, let’s create a very simple Vaadin application. This will have the added advantage to let us hack something on the client-side as well for the last part of this series. As we are fully polyglot, we will avoid the old Java language and use something very cool instead.

This is the era of polyglot! Proponents of this practice spread the word that you’ve to choose the language best adapted to the problem at hand. And with a single team dedicated to a microservice, this might make sense.

In my career, I’ve noticed many small and un-expensive features that didn’t find their way into the Sprint backlog because they didn’t provide business value. However, they provided plenty of Return Over Investment during the life of the application, but that was completely overlooked due to short-sighted objectives (set by short-sighted management). Those include, but are not limited to: Monitoring in general, and more specifically metrics, health checks, etc.

Have you ever found yourself in the situation to finish a project and you’re about to deliver it to the Ops team. You’re so happy because this time, you covered all the bases: the documentation contains the JNDI datasource name the application will use, all environment-dependent parameters have been externalized in a property file - and documented, and you even made sure logging has been implemented at key points in the code.

Writing a book is a journey. At the beginning of the journey, you mostly know where you want to go, but have only vague notion of the way to get there and the time it will take. I’ve finally released the paperback version of Integration Testing from the Trenches on Amazon and that means this specific journey is at end. The book starts by a very generic discussion about testing and continues by defining Integration Testing in comparison to Unit Testing.

Blogging is very interesting, but just as for cars, it’s (unfortunately) not only about driving the car, it’s also about its maintenance. As I believe there’s some worthy content inside, and I’ve reached +20k visits per month, I thought it would be time to add or complete some features.

In Integration Testing from the Trenches, I made heavy use of UML diagrams. So far, I’ve tried and used many UML editors. I’ve used the one that came with NetBeans - past tense, they removed it, Microsoft Visio, Modelio - this might be one of the best and others that I don’t remember. I came to the following conclusion: most of the time, I just need to document an API or what I want designed, and there’s no need to be compliant to the latest UML specs.