A Java geek

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.

Java

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.

Development

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.

Development

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.

Java

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.

Java

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.

Java

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.

Java

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.

Miscellaneous

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.

A Java geek

Nicolas Fränkel's blog