A Java geek

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.

Development

Introduction to the Tower library

One of the components of my OpenTelemetry demo is a Rust application built with the Axum web framework. In its description, axum mentions: axum doesn’t have its own middleware system but instead uses tower::Service. This means axum gets timeouts, tracing, compression, authorization, and more, for free. It also enables you to share middleware with applications written using hyper or tonic.

Technical

Ops friendly Apache APISIX

Though I always worked on the Dev side of IT, I was also interested in the Ops side. I even had a short experience being a WebSphere admin: I used it several times, helping Ops deal with the Admin console while being a developer. Providing a single package that Ops can configure and deploy in different environments is very important.

Java

My final take on Gradle (vs. Maven)

I tweet technical content that I consider interesting, but the funny tweets are the ones that get the most engagement. I attended the JavaLand conference in March, stumbled upon the Gradle booth, and found this gem: Things have changed a lot 😂😂😂“When you can’t beat them, join them” pic.twitter.com/SnX3KN57o8— Nicolas Fränkel 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇬🇪 (@nicolas_frankel) March 22, 2023 Of course, at some point, a fanboy hijacked the thread and claimed the so-called superiority of Gradle.

Technical

System architecture: move authentication to the API Gateway

When exposing an application to the outside world, consider a Reverse-Proxy or an API Gateway to protect it from attacks. Rate Limiting comes to mind first, but it shouldn’t stop there. We can factor many features in the API Gateway and should be bold in moving them from our apps. In this post, I’ll show how to implement authentication at the Gateway API stage.

Technical

Apache APISIX without etcd

etcd is an excellent key-value distributed database used internally by Kubernetes and managed by the CNCF. It’s a great option, and that’s the reason why Apache APISIX uses it too. Yet, it’s not devoid of issues. First, some mention scalability, but one can expect this from a distributed data store that values consistency. Another issue may be the need for more familiarity with etcd.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog