Java is a great programming language for building portable software, still quite widespread. There may be something left to learn about it yet.
In the past, we advised using the constructor to inject dependencies with Spring, and we introduced Lombok.
Guess what?
Those go quite well along together, except maybe for a little trick to known when you wish to use Spring’s @Value.
We’ll cover all that in this post.
A few months back, a new guy joined our team and the Java world after a few years of being a .NET programmer. He had many reactions like, “What, you need to write that yourself in Java? In .NET, the compiler does it for you!”
It’s true that, in Java, the language and conventions drive you to write a non-negligible amount of low-value code. But don’t fear! Lombok aims at simplifying that task for you.
Read moreWe won’t discuss the merits of testing today, I’ll just suggest a library that helps them write differently and, according to me, makes them more comprehensible.
Read moreA few weeks back, I reviewed code from a young developer.
It was impressive work for a topic he didn’t know beforehand, except on one aspect: every output used System.out.println().
That’s understandable: that’s how Java developers learn to code, just like Python developers do their first tests with print.
But that’s not something that’ll be handy for a live application.
Recently, a colleague of mine came with a wide smile and said, “I have a candidate to interview. There’s J2EE on his resume, but he’s too young to have worked with it. I might have, not him.”
That’s a recurring joke among senior Java technicians: it’s not uncommon for candidates to hear J-2-E and write it J2EE when they should simply use JEE. It’s not completely incorrect, but it may cause some confusion.
Read moreLast year, I posted about the v2.0 of the Download Proxy. At the time, the main event was the change of the technological stack and a restricted set of transformations. Today, I happily publish a version 2.1. Here are the main changes.
Read moreIf you’ve been using Spring for a while, or copy-pasting some web tutorials or examples, you’ve probably put some @Autowired annotations on private fields.
This does work, but it’s not the best way to do it.
A few years back, I had problems downloading files I needed in order to work. It’s not uncommon for developers to have higher access rights on their machine, but this almost never applies to the firewall. So, you may have the right to install all software you need and yet still be unable to download it without a two-day-long exchange with a security service located in another city. That’s annoying. And that’s when I came up with the Download Proxy.
Read moreWhen you develop a Java program that accesses a database, you’re likely to need a JDBC driver. When that database is an Oracle product, you keep that O for OJDBC.
For years, I just used the version an architect had selected. Then, I became the architect and I had to understand which version to choose. It’s not that complicated, just not really well explained. Let me try to contribute…
Read moreI’ve discussed with several people, this year. Technical leads, technical supervisors, architects… You get the gist. Among those discussions, I heard a recurring complaint, which I previously feared to be my demanding nature expressing itself.
But no! Other people noticed it too, and it basically boils down to something like this: we’re facing a new generation of developers, who like to do things fast and don’t care much about how things work deep down, and we’re living in an era proposing a new framework to help them go faster and not understand. The two together won’t make for great developers. Good developers, maybe, but not great ones.
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