A Java geek

I recently stumbled upon a post telling about the Josephus problem and trying to solve it in different scripting languages. For the sake of brevity, here’s the problem (taken from the referenced post): Flavius Josephus was a roman historian of Jewish origin. During the Jewish-Roman wars of the first century AD, he was in a cave with fellow soldiers, 40 men in all, surrounded by enemy Roman troops. They decided to commit suicide by standing in a ring and counting off each third man. Each

Recruiting is a complex process, and recruiting developers even more so. In this post, I will focus solely on the interviewing part (and leave the rant about recruiters who are paid 1 year of the candidate’s salary to just match buzzwords for another time). I recently stumbled upon an article about interview questions, again, telling you about 'right' answers for such and such questions. There are plenty of such articles on the World Wide Web, full-fledged sites dedicated to this topic an

Logging is for sure not a glamorous subject, but it’s a critical one - at least for DevOps and Ops teams. While there are plenty of material on the Web describing how to change your ASCII banner, there is not much on how to efficiently manage the log output. By default, Spring Boot will output log on the console and not use any file at all. However, it’s possible to tell Spring Boot to log in an output file. At the simplest level, the path where Spring Boot will put the spring.log

In the last post, I tried to describe the internal working of Spring Boot starter. It’s now time to develop our own! As an example, we will use XStream, a no-fluff just-stuff XML/JSON (de)serializer offered by Thoughtworks. Readers who only use JAXB and Jackson are advised to have a look at XStream, it’s extremely efficient and its API is quite easy to use. As seen in our last post, the entry-point of a starter lies in the META-INF/spring.factories file. Let’s create such a

Since its release, Spring Boot has been a huge success: it boosts developers productivity with its convention over configuration philosophy. However, sometimes, it just feels too magical. I have always been an opponent of autowiring for this exact same reason. And when something doesn’t work, it’s hard to get back on track. This is the reason why I wanted to dig deeper into Spring Boot starter mechanism - to understand every nook and cranny. This post is the first part and will focu

It’s no mystery that I’m a fan of both Spring Boot and Vaadin. When the Spring Boot Vaadin add-on became GA, I was ecstatic. Lately, I became interested in Kotlin, a JVM-based language offered by JetBrains. Thus, I wanted to check how I could develop a small Spring Boot Vaadin demo app in Kotlin - and learn something in the process. Here are my discoveries, in no particular order. Spring needs non-final stuff It seems Spring needs @Configuration classes and @Bean methods to be non

This is quite an unusual post, as it is the first post of 2016. Moreover, it’s also unusual because it’s my 300th post there! Though it might seem like an ego trip, I feel it’s important to think about the things that lead here. This blog started in April 2008, a little less than 8 years ago. At the time, I was between 2 missions and had much time to spare. I knew I wanted to start a blog, I just didn’t know what I wanted to tell - which basically is the first thing you

Working on a legacy project those last weeks gave me plenty of material to write about tests, Mockito and PowerMock. Last week, I wrote about abusing PowerMock. However, this doesn’t mean that you should never use PowerMock; only that if its usage is commonplace, it’s a code smell. In this article, I’d like to show an example how one can refactor legacy code to a more testable design with the temporary help of PowerMock. Let’s check how we can do that using the following c