A Java geek

Make your life easier with Kotlin stdlib

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.

Miscellaneous

Making the most out of conferences

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.

Miscellaneous

On developer shortage

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.

JavaEE

Is Object-Oriented Programming compatible with an enteprise context?

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.

Development

The multiple usages of git rebase --onto

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.

JavaEE

Alternative navigator in Vaadin

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.

Java

Migrating a Spring Boot application to Java 9 - Modules

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.

Java

Migrating a Spring Boot application to Java 9 - Compatibility

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.

Java

Truly immutable builds

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.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog