A Java geek

Some weeks ago, I wrote a post detailing how to send JMX metrics from a Spring Boot app to Elasticsearch by developing another Spring Boot app. Getting to create such an app is not always the right idea but developers are makers - software makers, and developing new apps is quite alluring to them. However, in the overall scheme of things, this means time is not only spent in development, but also for maintenance during the entire lifetime of the app.

Nowadays, most companies use one or another Agile methodology for their software development projects. That makes people involved in software development projects at least aware of agile principles - whether they truly try to follow agile practices or just pay lip service to them for a variety of reasons remains debatable. To avoid any association with tainted practices, I’d rather use the name 'Exploratory Development'.

Last week, I wrote about how one could start developing one’s Logstash plugin coming from a Java developer background. However, with the acquisition of Packetbeat, Logstash now has help from Beats to push data to Elasticsearch. Beats are developed in Go, another challenge for traditional Java developers. This week, I tried porting my Logstash Reddit plugin to a dedicated Beat. This post documents my findings (spoiler: I found it much easier than with Ruby).

I recently became interested in Logstash, and after playing with it for a while, I decided to create my own custom plugin for learning purpose. I chose to pull data from Reddit because a) I use it often and b) there’s no existing plugin that offers that.

This week’s post aims to describe how to send JMX metrics taken from the JVM to an Elasticsearch instance. Business app requirements The business app(s) has some minor requirements. The easiest use-case is to start from a Spring Boot application. In order for metrics to be available, just add the Actuator dependency to it: <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.

Given the trend around microservices, it has become mandatory to be able to follow a transaction across multiple microservices. Spring Cloud Sleuth is such a distributed tracing system fully integrated into the Spring Boot ecosystem. By adding the spring-cloud-starter-sleuth into a project’s POM, it instantly becomes Sleuth-enabled and every standard log call automatically adds additional data, such as spanId and traceId to the usual data. 2016-11-25 19:05:53.

As a Java developer, when you are first shown how to run the JVM in debug mode, attach to it and then set a breakpoint, you really feel like you’ve reached a step on your developer journey. Well, at least I did. Now the world is going full microservice and knowing that trick means less and less in it everyday.

Most Spring developers know about the BeanPostProcessor and the BeanFactoryPostProcessor classes. The former enables changes to new bean instances before they can be used, while the latter lets you modify bean definitions - the metadata to create the bean.

As a consultant, I’ve done a lot of Java projects in different 'enterprise' environments. In general, the Continuous Integration stack - when there’s one, is comprised of: Github Enterprise or Atlassian Stash for source version control, Jenkins as the Continuous Integration server, sometimes but rarely Atlassian Bamboo, Maven for the build tool, JaCoCo for code coverage, or even Artifactory as the artifacts repository - once I had Nexus.

In Android, every tutorial teaching you the basics describe how to design screen through XML files. It’s also possible to achieve the same result with Java (or any JVM-based language). Android screen design is not the only domain where XML and Java are valid options. For example, Spring configuration and Vaadin screen design allow both.