A Java geek

This is the 1st post in the The state of JVM desktop frameworks focus series. I’m interested in GUI applications since I’ve starting coding. Building a back-end app that manages teraflops of operations is an impressive engineering feat. But the feedback cycle when developing a desktop app is much shorter. That makes it, at least for me, much more motivating. This is even truer for side-projects.

If you like cool stories about how an engineer, faced with an impossible problem, overcame all odds and solved it, this post is not for you. This is a story of how I spent a non-trivial amount of time, how I hit a couple of walls, and how I nearly came back to square one. Why do I write it? The first reason is for me: I want to document my journey so if I ever think about trying again in the future, I’ll have some arguments against it.

Last week, I wrote a post that described how to hack the Maven dependency resolution system. I admit it was a dirty hack, it’s even in the post name. But I got it wrong. Thanks Stéphane Nicoll for pointing it out: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/snicoll/status/1338394993162145792' Even though I linked the documentation, I misread it. Here’s my mea culpa.

Logging is one of the fundamental components of any application which runs in production. Yet, between performance and logging in critical environments, I’d favor the former. For that reason, modern logging frameworks should implement at least two requirements: Async appenders: the write operation shouldn’t be blocking the execution of the programLazy computation: the framework doesn’t run expensive computations until they are needed - or never if that’s the case.

Between 2009 and 2013, I published ten book reviews on this blog. And since then, nothing. Reading a book is a huge commitment, not to mention the review. During the lockdown, Manning approached me for a 'partnership opportunity'. In general, I turn down such offers. But I already bought and read books from Manning in the past: they range from above-average to good reads. I proposed to amend the deal like this: Manning sends a book of my choice for free and I write an honest review.

One of my current talks is about creating a Kubernetes operator in Java. I demo it step by step. In the later steps, I’m using GraalVM native image to create a native executable. In that regard, some libraries are not compatible with the native image creation process. Several options are available to make them work anyway. One of the options is to substitute incompatible code with compatible one. In the above post, I describe how to use those substitutions. I thought I had it right.