Blog

Type-safe HTTP routing in Java and Rust

In recent years, the trend in our pop-culture industry has been to favour static and strong typing as well as build-time checks over dynamic typing and techniques like late binding. Where possible, you are expected to use the compiler for correctness checks instead of unit tests. Even though the Java language is statically typed, its type system is often considered to be not very helpful. Web applications written in Java are traditionally bristling with weakly typed APIs, heavy use of reflection, and lots of annotations that are interpreted at runtime. Let’s see how far the trend towards build-time checks has been adopted in the Java ecosystem when it comes to writing web applications, how it compares to what’s done in the Rust community, and what benefits and weak points these techniques have.

Where does it go from here?

In this (fifth) installment of the mini-series on software architecture, we leave behind the realm of small to medium-sized systems and take a look at large, risky, and complex projects. In other words, we examine the “scaling” of the role of software architecture.

Who does it?

Fundamentals of software architecture – Part 4

Communicating organizational changes with “Team Topologies”

Whenever the need arises to set up a new team, split a team into two or move responsibilities between teams it is necessary to have a good idea of where you are and where you want to be after the change. Additionally to the current and final states you will very likely have phases with intermediate states. To help everyone involved to have a shared understanding of which phases you will transition through - and when responsibilities and communication channels have to be created or changed - a visual representation of these states can be used to paint a (literal) common picture.

Automating Dependency Updates with Renovate

Regardless of whether we are working on an application or a library, we always have to deal with dependencies. We are dependent on the version of our programming language, on external or internal libraries, and on tools. In addition to the actual administrative tasks, it is also necessary to update these regularly. Even beyond performing the update itself, this means we need to learn when a new version exists. That’s why this article examines a bot-based solution that can help us with this exact issue.

Technologies for the Integration of Services

A small architecture study

Tasks and activities – How is it done?

In this part of the mini-series, we explain everything you need to do when creating software architecture. First, we take a look at the necessary tasks and activities. Then we discuss some of the skills and capabilities required for these architecture tasks.

Combinable Elements for User Interfaces on the Web

The way we develop user interfaces on the web has changed significantly in recent years. In this column, we therefore want to examine what a modern approach looks like and which challenges this poses, especially for classic template engines from the Java world.

Extending the OpenTelemetry Java Agent for Spring Auto-Instrumentation

The Evolutionist

The current training and further education of software developers strongly focuses on the development of new software. Conferences and trade magazines are full of new programming languages, new tools, new hypes, which seemingly never cease to amaze. Quick results, direct feedback, and unprecedented productivity are suggested. The urge to incorporate the new into one’s software is awakened – until one is brought back to reality: their own legacy system.

Terms

Welcome to the second part in the mini-series on software architecture.

Building, purpose, aesthetics

Fundamentals of software architecture - Part 1

Rate Limiting with Spring Boot, Bucket4j, and Redis

Let’s implement rate-limiting protection for multiple Spring Boot server instances using bucket4j and redis to have the solution on application level.

Rate Limiting with Spring Boot

Let’s implement rate-limiting protection for your Spring Boot server without the need for any additional dependencies beyond those included in the Spring Boot Starter package.

Compacted State Feeds

Rooting Out Issues: JPA and Lombok Combination Problems Demystified

Ever encountered perplexing issues with JPA and Lombok’s @Data annotation when handling entities in Java? This blog post explores unexpected behaviors, especially with auto-generated IDs, in conjunction with equals and hashCode methods. Learn about identity and uncover how you can resolve these challenges forever.

Automated code maintenance with OpenRewrite

With the large number of software development projects in most organisations, keeping these projects up to date with the latest security patches and framework updates can be quite a task. OpenRewrite is a library that provides an automated solution to this problem. Using recipes written in Java, it can perform large-scale source code refactoring during the build process, preserving as much of the original code as possible. In this blog post, I will explain how OpenRewrite works and how you can use it to refactor your code base.

Schema Evolution

with Apache Avro

Micro Frontends With Ionic And Capacitor

We planned and set up a micro frontend architecture using Capacitor and Ionic. In this article, I talk about some of the challenges we faced and the ways we solved them.

Testing your GitLab CI/CD pipeline

If you develop a pipeline as a service for other development teams you should treat it as a product and establish product development processes, a versioning strategy, etc. around it. Besides that, as potentially many teams will use and rely on your pipeline you want to make sure that new features don’t break existing functionality. This ensures that your customer base remains happy and able to deliver business value. Therefore you need some sort of testing and we will demonstrate a way to (integration-) test your GitLab CI/CD pipeline.

JDK 21, the next long-term support release

An overview of the changes since JDK 17

Containers for tests and local development with Spring Boot 3.1

Spring Boot 3.1.0, the most recent minor release of Spring Boot 3, appeared in May. In this article, we will be taking a look at how the new support for Testcontainers and Docker Compose can help us with tests and local development.

Testing in Spring Boot applications

In addition to production code, we typically also write tests to discover and correct possible errors as early as possible in the development process. For new functionality, it isn’t even uncommon to write more test code than production code. At the same time, the tests should be as fast as possible, so they can be executed frequently without causing long delays. In this article, we explore how this can be done in applications based on Spring Boot.

How to bootstrap a tech conference with a 100% women+ speaker lineup

A look back to the Women+ in Data and AI Summer Festival as we plan ahead for 2024

No future-proof architectures!

Architecture: The term itself radiates stability. It seems clear, then, that good architecture should be future-proof. But precisely this goal often leads to problems. Does that mean it is better not to design future-proof architectures?