A Java geek

May 10, 2015 quality sonarqube

Quality Tools: humble servants or tyrants?

I’ve always been an ardent proponent of internal quality in software, because in my various experiences, I’ve had more than my share of crappy codebases to maintain. I believe that quality tools can increase the internal quality of the code, thus decreasing maintenance costs in the long run. However, I don’t think that such tools are the only way to achieve that - I’m also a firm believer in code reviews. Regarding quality tools, I started with Checkstyle, then with PMD,

Apr 26, 2015 bug database

Connection is a leaky abstraction

As junior Java developers, we learn very early in our career about the JDBC API. We learn it’s a very important abstraction because it allows to change the underlying database in a transparent manner. I’m afraid what appeared as a good idea is just over-engineering because: I’ve never seen such a database migration happen in more than 10 yearsMost of the time, the SQL written is not database independent Still, there' s no denying that JDBC is at the bottom of every database in

Apr 19, 2015 kotlin polyglot webapp

Polyglot everywhere - part 2

Last week, we set up a new project using the YAML flavor of Polyglot Maven. Now is time for some server-side code! As a long time Vaadin advocate, let’s create a very simple Vaadin application. This will have the added advantage to let us hack something on the client-side as well for the last part of this series. As we are fully polyglot, we will avoid the old Java language and use something very cool instead. As I’ve have been to some conferences with its number 1 advocate, I settl

Apr 12, 2015 build maven polyglot

Polyglot everywhere - part 1

This is the era of polyglot! Proponents of this practice spread the word that you’ve to choose the language best adapted to the problem at hand. And with a single team dedicated to a microservice, this might make sense. My pragmatic side tells me it means that developers get to choose the language they are developing with and don’t care how it will be maintained when they go away… On the other hand, my shiny-loving side just want to try - albeit in a more controlled env

Apr 6, 2015 software engineering versioning

What's the version of my deployed application?

In my career, I’ve noticed many small and un-expensive features that didn’t find their way into the Sprint backlog because they didn’t provide business value. However, they provided plenty of Return Over Investment during the life of the application, but that was completely overlooked due to short-sighted objectives (set by short-sighted management). Those include, but are not limited to: Monitoring in general, and more specifically metrics, health checks, etc. Environment data

Mar 29, 2015 bintray maven

Better developer-to-developer collaboration with Bintray

I recently got interested in Spring Social, and as part of my learning path, I tried to integrate their Github module which is still in Incubator mode. Unfortunately, this module seems to have been left behind, and its dependency on the core module uses an old version of it. And since I use the latest version of this core, Maven resolves one version to put in the WEB-INF/lib folder of the WAR package. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so well at runtime. The following diagram shows this situ

Mar 8, 2015 devops metrics spring boot

Become a DevOps with Spring Boot

Have you ever found yourself in the situation to finish a project and you’re about to deliver it to the Ops team. You’re so happy because this time, you covered all the bases: the documentation contains the JNDI datasource name the application will use, all environment-dependent parameters have been externalized in a property file - and documented, and you even made sure logging has been implemented at key points in the code. Unfortunately, Ops refuse your delivery since they don̵

Mar 1, 2015 arqullian integration testing java EE spring test

Final release of Integration Testing from the Trenches

Writing a book is a journey. At the beginning of the journey, you mostly know where you want to go, but have only vague notion of the way to get there and the time it will take. I’ve finally released the paperback version of Integration Testing from the Trenches on Amazon and that means this specific journey is at end. The book starts by a very generic discussion about testing and continues by defining Integration Testing in comparison to Unit Testing. The next chapter compares the respecti

Feb 22, 2015 agile management software development

Work for a company not lead by finance

Disclaimer: this post touches bits and pieces of finance, management and sociology for which I’m far from qualified. However, I’ve plenty of experience working in companies where they had big effects and I couldn’t resist drawing my own conclusions. I’ll happily listen to realistic solutions. I’ve been working for more than a decade in the software industry, always as a consultant. Most of my employers were pure consulting companies, with only my latest employer be

Feb 15, 2015

Avoid sequences of if...else statements

Adding a feature to legacy code while trying to improve it can be quite challenging, but also quite straightforward. Nothing angers me more than stumbling upon patterns of if/else statements returning a single value each time.