A Java geek

Python "magic" methods - part 1

Java was the first language I used professionally and is the scale by which I measure other languages I learned afterward. It’s an OOP statically-typed language. Hence, Python feels a bit weird because of its dynamic typing approach. For example, Object offers methods equals(), hashCode(), and toString(). Because all other classes inherit from Object, directly or indirectly, all objects have these methods by definition.

Development

Calling Rust from Python

I recently watched GOTO conferences' talk Calling Functions Across Languages by Richard Feldman. I’m afraid I have to disagree with using the term 'language' in this context. It’s a no-brainer to call Java from Kotlin or Scala or to call Java from Kotlin. Hence, in the rest, I’ll use 'stack'.

Development

Resizing images on-the-fly

As a web architect, one of the many issues is asset management. And the most significant issue in assets is images. A naive approach would be to set an image and let the browser resize the image via CSS: img { height: 100%; width: 100%; object-fit: contain; } However, it means that you download the original image. It entails two problems: the size of the original image and the suboptimal browser-based resizing.

Technical

Down the rabbit hole of an Apache APISIX plugin

My demo, Evolving your APIs, features a custom Apache APISIX plugin. I believe that the process of creating a custom plugin is relatively well-documented. However, I wanted to check the parameters of the _M.access(conf, ctx) function, especially the ctx one. The documentation states: The ctx parameter caches data information related to the request. You can use core.log.warn(core.json.encode(ctx, true)) to output it to error.log for viewing. Unfortunately, core.

Java

Monkey-patching in Java

The JVM is an excellent platform for monkey-patching. Monkey patching is a technique used to dynamically update the behavior of a piece of code at run-time. A monkey patch (also spelled monkey-patch, MonkeyPatch) is a way to extend or modify the runtime code of dynamic languages (e.g. Smalltalk, JavaScript, Objective-C, Ruby, Perl, Python, Groovy, etc.) without altering the original source code.

Development

Problem Details for HTTP APIs - RFC 7807 is dead, long live RFC 9457

The positive experience of RFC 7807, whose journey began in 2016, is concluded (deprecation) but also confirmed with a new official proposition: the RFC 9457. The changes made are small but it is a suitable opportunity to analyze the evolution of this topic.

Miscellaneous

Offering my blog to new authors

Regular readers of this blog know that I started it a long time ago, namely in April 2008. I soon found my cruising speed: a post a week. It requires time and discipline, but I achieved this goal during all those years. However, while I still have enough of both, I start to miss good post ideas. There are several reasons for this. I’ve always told that working on real-world projects is a vast source of ideas.

Technical

Send your logs to Loki

One of my current talks focuses on Observability in general and Distributed Tracing in particular, with an OpenTelemetry implementation. In the demo, I show how you can see the traces of a simple distributed system consisting of: the Apache APISIX API Gateway, a Kotlin app with Spring Boot, a Python app with Flask, and a Rust app with Axum. Earlier this year, I spoke and attended the Observability room at FOSDEM.

A Java geek

Nicolas Fränkel's blog