I tweet technical content that I consider interesting, but the funny tweets are the ones that get the most engagement. I attended the JavaLand conference in March, stumbled upon the Gradle booth, and found this gem: Things have changed a lot 😂😂😂“When you can’t beat them, join them” pic.twitter.com/SnX3KN57o8— Nicolas Fränkel 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇬🇪 (@nicolas_frankel) March 22, 2023 Of course, at some point, a fanboy hijacked the thread and claimed the so-called superiority of Gradle.

Last week, I described different techniques to fasten your Maven builds. Today, I’d like to widen the scope and do the same for Maven builds inside Docker. Between each run, we change the source code by adding a single blank line; between each section, we remove all built images, including the intermediate ones that are the results of the multi-stage build. The idea is to avoid reusing a previously built image. Baseline To compute a helpful baseline, we need a sample project.

Builds require a few properties, chief among them reproducibility. I would consider speed to be low on the order of priorities. However, it’s also one of the most limiting factors to your release cycle: if your build takes T, you cannot release faster than each T. Hence, you’ll probably want to speed up your builds after you’ve reached a certain maturity level to enable more frequent releases.

It sometimes happen that after a few years, an app is stable enough that it gets into hibernating mode. Though it’s used and useful, there are no changes to it and it happily runs its life. Then, after a while, someone decides to add some new features again. Apart from simple things such as locating the sources, one of the most important thing is to be able to build the app. Though it may seem trivial, there are some things to think about.

Last week, I wrote on how to design a generic Docker image for Maven-based auto-executable webapps. The designed build file has 3 different stages: checkout from Github, build with Maven and execute with Java. The Maven build stage takes quite a long time, mostly due to: Executing testsDownloading dependencies Tests can be executed earlier in the build chain - then skipped for Docker, this post will focus on speeding up the download of the dependencies. Let’s check each option in turn.

Since the Docker 'revolution', I’ve been interested in creating a Dockefile for Spring applications. I’m far from an ardent practitioner, but the principle of creating the Dockerfile is dead simple. As in Java - or probably any programming language, however, while it’s easy to achieve something that works, it’s much harder to create something that works well.

Stop the f… about #Spring & #Hibernate migrating to #Gradle. Repeat after me: "my project do NOT have the same requirements" #Maven— Nicolas Fränkel 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇬🇪 (@nicolas_frankel) July 16, 2013 This was my week’s hate, and I take full responsibility for every character in it. While that may seem like a troll, Twitter is not really the place to have a good-natured debate with factual arguments, so here is the follow up.