A Java geek

This week’s post is pretty short. I’ve already written about overengineering, but this adds a personal touch. I had to rewrite my Jet Train demo to use another data provider, switching from a Swiss one to a Bay Area one. One of the main components of the demo is a streaming pipeline. The pipeline: Reads data from a web endpointTransforms data through several stepsWrites the final data into an in-memory data grid Most of the transform steps in #2 enrich the data. Each of them requi

Kotlin offers many exciting features. In general, developers tend to cite null safety as their favorite. For me, it’s function extensions. But delegation comes a close second. The delegation pattern The delegation pattern is described in the GoF book: Delegation is a way to make composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance [Lie86, JZ91]. In delegation, two objects are involved in handling a request: a receiving object delegates operations to its delegate. This is analogous to su

Frameworks promise to speed up one’s development pace provided one follows the mainstream path. The path may be more or less narrow. I’m a big fan of the Spring ecosystem because its design is extensible and customizable at different abstraction levels: thus, the path is as large as you need it to be. Functional Programming is becoming more and more popular. Spring provides a couple of DSLs for the Kotlin language. For example, the Beans DSL and the Routes DSL allow for a more funct

A couple of years ago, I attended a talk of my former colleague (but still friend) Volker Simonis. It gave me the idea to dig a bit into the subject of how to secure the JVM. From the material, I created a series of blog posts as well as a talk. From that point on, I submitted the talk at meetups and conferences, where it was well-received. Because I like to explore different areas, I stopped to submit other proposals. Still, the talk is in my portfolio, and it was requested again in 2021. I ha

Posts that have been written about Hibernate’s LazyInitializationException could probably fill whole books. Yet, I believe each of them focuses on a particular aspect of it: some on a specific solution, some on how to solve it with Spring Boot, etc. I’d like this post to be the definitive guide on the subject, even though I’m pretty sure it won’t. At least, I’ll be able to point others to it. The root cause Whether you love or hate ORM frameworks in general, they

I’ve been playing with GraalVM AOT compilation capability since I became aware of it. As a long-time Spring aficionado, I carefully monitored the efforts that the engineers at Tanzu have put into making Spring AOT-compatible. Recently, they announced the beta version of the integration. In this post, I want to check how easy it is to produce a (working!) Docker image from an existing Spring Boot application. Introduction GraalVM provides many different features. Among them, the componen

Mid-January, I held a talk at Kotlin.amsterdam based on my post Migrating from Imperative to Reactive (a Spring Boot application). Because it was a Kotlin meetup, I demoed Kotlin code, and I added a step by migrating the codebase to coroutines. During Q&A, somebody asked whether coroutines implemented backpressure. I admit I was not sure of the answer, so I did a bit of research. This post provides information on backpressure in general and how RxJava (v3), Project Reactor and Kotlin’

I’ve been using minikube as my local cluster since I started to learn Kubernetes. But I’ve decided to let it go in favor of kind. Here’s the story. A couple of weeks ago, I gave my talk on Zero Downtime on Kubernetes. A demo is included in the talk, as with most of my presentations. While rehearsing in the morning, the demo worked, albeit slowly. Two days before that, I had another demo that also uses Kubernetes and it was already slow. But I didn’t take the hint. Duri

Gone are the times when developers' jobs ended with the release of the application. Nowadays, developers care more and more about the operational side of IT: perhaps they operate applications themselves, but more probably, their organization fosters increased collaboration between Dev and Ops. I started to become interested in the Ops side of software when I was still a consultant. When Spring Boot released the Actuator, I became excited. Via its convention-other-configuration nature, it was po

This week, I learned about a nifty 'new' feature of Optional that I want to share in this post. It’s available since Java 9, so its novelty is relative. Let’s start with the following sequence to compute the total price of an order: public BigDecimal getOrderPrice(Long orderId) { List<OrderLine> lines = orderRepository.findByOrderId(orderId); BigDecimal price = BigDecimal.ZERO; (1) for (OrderLine line : lines) { price = price.add(line.getPrice());