In the past three years, I was involved in developing microservices architectures. In Java, with Spring Boot and in Groovy with Grails. Perhaps risking some outrage, I will compare my experience in Java and Groovy, Spring Boot and Grails and give my opinion on what works best. I will start looking purely at languages, as Spring Boot will work happily with Groovy and Java alike. What I like in Java-based microservices ...
I love playing chess. I also love programming. How to marry the two? How about playing chess against a chess engine (chess playing program) that I have designed and wrote? If you are intrigued- read on! This is the first blog post in the series about building my chess engine in Java. The rules of chess I assume that you are more-less familiar with the rules of chess. You have two “armies” facing each other, making a move after a move, until one side is guaranteed to capture the enemy king (the checkmate), or neither side can win- a draw. ...
You might have seen recently some Pluralsight promotion on my page. There are two reasons for this. Reason number one- I became a Pluralsight Affiliate and I earn by promoting their website. Reason number two- I use Pluralsight myself and I think it is a great place to level up your skills. In this article, I will explain why you should consider it too! What is Pluralsight? Pluralsight is an online training platform… Ok, come on, I am not going to bore you to death here! ...
Have you heard of Reddit? It is an amazing place on the Internet, where people share links and ideas. It has also a very active programming community. I visit Reddit daily- you can learn a lot from people there and have some interesting discussion. In this article, I will tell you how I use Reddit and why I consider it so valuable. Reddit is not the only social media that I use for learning about technology. I have previously written about using Twitter for staying up to with the Java world. ...
Should I learn Java? This is a question that just keeps coming up. If you are just starting out as a developer, if you already work as a Front End Developer or even if you are from the .NET background, many people wonder if learning Java is the right career/personal development move. Let’s see how useful learning Java is in 2018. When I first started using Java, around 2007, it had a very mixed reputation. On one hand, it was a reasonably new and modern language, but on the other, it was infamous for its bad performance (not fully deserved in my opinion) and verbosity (when contrasted with, back then, very popular Python). ...
Together with the growing popularity of microservices and light-weight REST API, we are witnessing another trend in Java: the rise of Java Microframeworks. Javalin, Micronaut, Spark and many more make building REST APIs a breeze. In this article, I look at this exciting space and share my opinions on their use. What is a microframework? Microframework is a minimalistic web application framework. What usually differs it from more traditional, large applications framework is: ...
I feel horrible today. I am sick- my throat hurts, my head is not working as it should. Hence, I decided I will tell you how to write horrible Java code. If you are tired of all these beautiful patterns and best practices and you want to write something insane- read on. Maybe you like horror stories but in code- this may appeal to you! If you are looking for advice on how to write good code- look elsewhere! Check my review of “Effective Java“ and take it from there. Nothing nice is waiting for you in the following paragraphs… But if you are insisting on reading… ...
Writing good software requires using the right tools. Choosing the right frameworks, libraries and designing smart systems. With all that to learn and worry about, it is easy to forget about another very important thing: using your programming language wisely. In this article, I want to introduce you to *“Effective Java”*by Joshua Bloch. Effective Java– back to “basics” With the JVM ecosystem moving faster than ever, it is easy for us to forget that writing good software is more than using frameworks correctly. ...
Java, Microservices, other JVM languages… Programming, best practices, architecture… Libraries, frameworks, methodologies… I could go on for a while here. Being a passionate and up to date Software Developer is a challenge. How do you stay up to date with all this? I will let you on a well-known secret- use Twitter! Read on to find out what can Twitter help you with and how I use it to stay up to date. ...
One of the new features of Java 9 is the introduction of the Reactive Streams SPI to the JDK. Reactive programming keeps gaining in popularity, mainly because it works well. If you are not familiar with the principles, I recommend checking out The Reactive Manifesto to which I subscribe. To learn more about Reactive Streams in Java, read on. Reactive Streams got introduced to Java as java.util.concurrent.Flow. Before looking into that, let’s see what are Reactive Streams and how can we make use of them. ...