A Java geek

Why I enrolled in an online Scala course

When I heard that the Coursera online platform offered free Scala courses, I jumped at the opportunity. Here are some reasons why: Over the years, I’ve been slowly convinced that whatever the language you program in your professional life, learning new languages is an asset as it change the way you design your code. For example, the excellent LambdaJ library gave me an excellent overview of how functional programming can be leveraged to ease manipulation of collections in Java.

JavaEE

Web Services: JAX-WS vs Spring

In my endless search for the best way to develop applications, I’ve recently been interested in web services in general and contract-first in particular. Web services are coined contract-first when the WSDL is designed in the first place and classes are generated from it. They are acknowledged to be the most interoperable of web services, since the WSDL is agnostic from the underlying technology.

Java

Lessons learned from integrating jBPM 4 with Spring

When I was tasked with integrating a process engine into one of my projects, I quickly decided in favor of Activiti. Activiti is the next version of jBPM 4, is compatible with BPMN 2.0, is well documented and has an out-of-the-box module to integrate with Spring. Unfortunately, in a cruel stroke of fate, I was overruled by my hierarchy (because of some petty reason I dare not write here) and I had to use jBPM. This articles tries to list all lessons I learned in this rather epic journey.

Java

XML validation with imported/included schemas

Recently, I tried to help a teammate design a WSDL file. I gently drove him toward separating the interface itself in the WSDL file and domain objects in a XML Schema file. One thing leading to another, I also made him split this XSD into two separate files, one including another for design purposes. Alas, tests were already present, and they failed miserably after my refactoring, complaining about a type in the included file not being found.

Java

Re-use your test classes across different projects

Sometimes, you need to reuse your test classes across different projects. These are two use-cases that I know of: Utility classes that create relevant domain objects used in different modulesDatabase test classes (ans resources) that need to be run in the persistence project as well as the integration test project Since I’ve seen more than my share of misuses, this article aim to provide an elegant solution once and for all.

JavaEE

Spring Data, Spring Security and Envers integration

Spring Data JPA, Spring Security and Envers are libraries that I personally enjoy working with (and I tend to think they are considered best-of-breed in their respective category). Anyway, I wanted to implement what I consider a simple use-case: entities have to be Envers-audited but the revision has to contain the identity of the user that initiated the action. Although it seem simple, I had some challenges to overcome to achieve this. This article lists them and provide a possible solution.

Java

Method injection with Spring

Spring core comes out-of-the-box with two scopes: singletons and prototypes. Singletons implement the Singleton pattern, meaning there’s only a single instance at runtime (in a JVM). Spring instantiate them during context creation, caches them in the context, and serves them from the cache when needed (or something like that). Prototypes are instantiated each time you access the context to get the bean.

JavaEE

Transaction management: EJB3 vs Spring

Transaction management is a subject that is generally left to the tender care of a senior developer (or architect). Given the messages coming from soem actors of the JavaEE community that with newer versions of JavaEE you don’t need Spring anymore, I was interested in some fact-checking on how transaction management was handled in both technologies. Note: these messages were already sent one year and a half ago and prompted me to write this article.

JavaEE

Empower your CSS in your Maven build

People who know me also know I’ve interest in the GUI: that means I’ve sometimes to get my hands dirty and dig deep into stylesheets (even though I’ve no graphical skill whatsoever). When it happens, I’ve always questions regarding how to best factorize styles. In this regard, the different CSS versions are lacking, because they were not meant to be managed by engineers.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog