A Java geek

IMHO, Kotlin is not about big killer features - although extension methods and properties could certainly be categorized as such, but about a bunch of small improvements that have deep impact. Most of them are not built-in into the language, but are functions offered as part of the Kotlin standard library. In this post, I’d like to go through a limited set of them, and describe how they can be used to improve the code.

This week was my last conference of 2017, Voxxed Day Thessaloniki organized by my good friend Patroklos. I started going to conferences some years ago. Going to a conference is an investment, whether in time or in money - or in both. You should me make sure to get the most out of that investment. In this post, I’d like to write down what I do to achieve that. Plan ahead The first thing to do is to get the list of available talks ahead. Some conferences require attendees to register to

Who is not aware that there’s a developer shortage? I mean, if you’re into the software industry, everybody is telling it every now and then - especially if you’re on the recruiting side. To handle that, companies come up with creative solutions - some are sponsoring education initiatives, or even creating their own. However, I think it’s not the right answer. Of course, there’s no doubt that there’s a shortage of good developers. Yet, that’s true for e

This week, during a workshop related to a Java course I give at a higher education school, I noticed the code produced by the students was mostly - ok, entirely, procedural. In fact, though the Java language touts itself as an Object-Oriented language, it’s not uncommon to find such code developed by professional developers in enterprises. For example, the JavaBean specification is in direct contradiction of one of OOP’s main principle, encapsulation.

I’m not Git expert and I regularly learn things in Git that changes my view of the tool. When I was showed git rebase -i, I stopped over-thinking about my commits. When I discovered git reflog, I became more confident in rebasing. But I think one of the most important command I was taught was git rebase --onto. IMHO, the documentation has room for improvement regarding the result of option. If taking the image of the tree, it basically uproots a part of the tree to replant it somewhere el

In Vaadin, to change the components displayed on the screen, there are a few options. The most straightforward way is to use the setContent() method on the UI. The most widespread way is to use the navigator. Views managed by the navigator automatically get a distinct URI, which can be used to be able to bookmark the views and their states and to go back and forward in the browser history. — Vaadin documentation This is the main asset for apps managing catalogs, such as e-commerce s

Last week, I tried to make a Spring Boot app - the famous Pet Clinic, Java 9 compatible. It was not easy. I had to let go of a lot of features along the way. And all in all, the only benefit I got was improvement of String memory management. This week, I want to continue the migration by fully embracing the Java 9 module system.

With the coming of Java 9, there is a lot of buzz on how to migrate applications to use the module system. Unfortunately, most of the articles written focus on simple Hello world applications. Or worse, regarding Spring applications, the sample app uses legacy practices - like XML for example. This post aims to correct that by providing a step-to-step migration guide for a non-trivial modern Spring Boot application. The sample app chosen to do that is the Spring Pet clinic.

It sometimes happen that after a few years, an app is stable enough that it gets into hibernating mode. Though it’s used and useful, there are no changes to it and it happily runs its life. Then, after a while, someone decides to add some new features again. Apart from simple things such as locating the sources, one of the most important thing is to be able to build the app. Though it may seem trivial, there are some things to think about. Here are some advices on how to make apps that can

Nowadays, when a webapp offers a registration page, it usually duplicates the password field (or sometimes even the email field). By having you type the password twice, it wants to ensure that you didn’t make any mistake. And that you don’t have to reset the password the next time you try to login. It makes sense if you actually type the password. Me, I’m using a password manager. That means, I do a copy-paste the password I got from the password manager twice. So far, so good