A Java geek

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.

Feb 8, 2015 SEO wordpress

Show you blog some love

Blogging is very interesting, but just as for cars, it’s (unfortunately) not only about driving the car, it’s also about its maintenance. As I believe there’s some worthy content inside, and I’ve reached +20k visits per month, I thought it would be time to add or complete some features. Cookie authorization Though 'normal' blogging sites such as mine are probably below the radar of governments agencies, European laws mandate for sites to ask about users consent before

Feb 1, 2015

Developing around PlantUML

In Integration Testing from the Trenches, I made heavy use of UML diagrams. So far, I’ve tried and used many UML editors. I’ve used the one that came with NetBeans - past tense, they removed it, Microsoft Visio, Modelio - this might be one of the best and others that I don’t remember. I came to the following conclusion: most of the time, I just need to document an API or what I want designed, and there’s no need to be compliant to the latest UML specs.

Jan 25, 2015 Architecture

Entropy of code

So you were tasked to prepare your next software project. Already, its overall architecture is designed, you already put some code-related parts in place such as the build file, the packages, perhaps a sample use-case. Then after a few months, the project is finished, and the final result has largely diverged from what you imagined:inconsistent packages naming and organization, completely different low-level implementations e.g. XML dependency injection, auto-wiring and Java configuration, etc.

Jan 18, 2015 open source spring vaadin

Improving the Vaadin 4 Spring project with a simpler MVP

I’ve been using the Vaadin 4 Spring library on my current project, and this has been a very pleasant experience. However, in the middle of the project, a colleague of mine decided to improve the testability. The intention was laudable, though the project already tried to implement the Model View Presenter pattern. Instead of correcting the mistakes here and there, he refactored the whole codebase using the provided MVP module… IMHO, this has been a huge mistake. In this article

Jan 8, 2015 jesuischarlie

Je suis Charlie

This week, there won’t be any technical article. As you might have heard about, cowards armed with automatic weapons brutally murdered cartoonists, journalists, policemen… All all in all, 12 people died because of stupidity and obscurantism, just because their truth was contradictory to their murderers' - or just because they happened to be on site. Right now, I’m afraid I start to understand what American people felt after September 11th. I’m not a cartoonist,