I attended JavaMug last Wednesday as the speaker was Craig Walls author of Spring Boot in Action. When I heard about the book I had planned on purchasing it, but was disappointed there was no kindle version on Amazon. It does state if you purchase the print edition they will give you the kindle one for free, but I am trying to move away from paper books in general.

Overall the talk was pretty good. It is nice that there is a Pivotal employee local to the area so we can get a talk like this done. For most of the talk Craig just sort of demonstrated examples of what you can do with Spring Boot since there were people of varying degrees of experience with it. It was held at Improving in Addison which I had never been to, but they had some nice beer on tap (Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale). In a talk like this where you are just trying to introduce the concept to people it is hard to get as deep of a dive as I would like. But I did enjoy the part of the demo playing around with the metrics. That is something I haven’t really played around with, but of course got me immediately thinking about how much I would like to use that at work. I think maybe this year I will attempt to convert our legacy app to Spring Boot. It will be painful, but it just seems like more and more the benefits are so good that is what we should be doing. Hopefully I can find the time at work.

I am a big fan of the work Oliver Gierke has done in Spring Data. It is a framework I use daily at work and it really is amazing. A while back Greg Turnquist had posted something on Twitter against field injection. So I asked what was wrong with field injection and he pointed me to this post that Oliver had written about it.

This post is going to be my attempt to argue against Oliver’s position on the subject. It may wind up an epic failure, but if nothing else I figured it would help me think through my thoughts and assumptions on the issue and see if I can make an argument in favor of it. First head over to Oliver’s post on the topic and read it before you continue on.

I may have mentioned this before, but I love going to software conferences. When I got the email mentioning that Cassandra Days was coming to Dallas with a free 1 day conference on all things Cassandra, I signed up immediately. The event was sponsored by Datastax who sells a commercial version of Cassandra called Datastax Enterprise. They had 2 tracks an introductory track for people who are just exploring Cassandra, but haven’t yet taken it to production, and track 2 which was a deeper dive for people with experience with Cassandra.

I attended the kegs & code last night. It was a code challenge and party with cash prizes that was hosted by Saltt Ventures. I had never attended a code challenge or hack-a-thon or anything like that, but I figured it is good to get out of your comfort zone every now and then and try something new. Plus when they have free beer that is a pretty big perk. The beer was supplied by BrainDead Brewery which I hadn’t had prior to this event. The event started out as a happy hour with pizza and beer and then at some point we setup and the challenge began. It was a race to solve 10 problems in the quickest amount of time with first place getting $500, second $250 and third $100.

I am happy to report that after much delay the Mojohaus team has finally fixed the Aspectj Maven plugin to allow disabling the annotation processing by the aspectj compiler. It will be fixed in version 1.8 of the plugin. You may recall that back in April I was forced to fork the project to fix this and move on so I could do our Spring 4.1 upgrade. I look forward to switching back to the community version and at that point I will probably delete my github repository as I never wanted to maintain my own version to begin with. Now back to some programming on my new Cassandra layer…

I just finished up the Java 8 lambda’s and streams class. I finished a little later than I wanted to because I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 last week which was an epic failure. I used the media download tool to upgrade prior to my machine coming up in the queue and all the upgrade ran normally and things appeared to work fine. At the end it booted up and presented a login screen. I attempted to login and the machine sat there spinning for about a minute and then rebooted. After coming back the same. At that point I realized I made a mistake trusting the upgrade and my normal windows procedure is to buy a new drive, do a clean install and then bring my data over. (That was last Wednesday.) So Thursday at noon I ran over to Microcenter and bought a new drive. Then over the weekend I did a clean install of 10 and copied my data from the old drive. I am not up and running on 10 and I would have to say I like it more than Windows 7. It seems fast on my old machine, the UI improvements are great, but I haven’t yet had a chance to test any of my games on Steam to see how it handles video gaming. A coworker tried to upgrade his Windows 7 laptop which also failed but his automatically rolled back. My nephew was able to successfully run the upgrade from Windows 8.1 so it seems like 8 is a safer OS to upgrade from.

After a month long hiatus I have returned. I have been traveling for most of the last month so the blog sort of fell to the side. Now that I am done with my summer travel I hope to be back to the weekly posting schedule. That being said I don’t have a lot of updates as I have been vacationing and not doing a lot of work so it was recharge time and not explore new technologies. However today there is a new MOOC starting that people may be interested in, it is the Java 8 Lambda and Streams Intro class. I plan on going through this class to try to improve my way of thinking to be more functional when solving problems in Java. I am hoping to do some work to push a container upgrade at work in the next couple of weeks which will allow us to go to Java 8 in production in the following month so with any luck I will be using these new constructs come fall in my projects.

Good news this week. Our purchase of Clover was approved and we will have our license keys in a matter of days. As of tomorrow it is going into our build and Cobertura is getting ripped out. You may recall I previously wrote about my issues with Cobertura. One problem was the latest version at the time 2.0.3 didn’t work with Powermock, even though 1.9.4.1 did. And the second issue I was having with it was the lack of Java 8 support since we are close to upgrading on our project at work. Well oddly enough early in this week I saw Cobertura had a new maven plug and a new release 2.1.1. I immediately updated to the 2.7 plugin to give it a go and it promptly failed on Powermock like 2.0.3. So I didn’t feel bad at all when 2 days later I found out our Clover purchase request had been approved.

I was reading the Spring Blog the other day and I came across this story. I was intrigued because I found the name funny so I read the post and watched the embedded youtube video and was completely blown away. Take all the excitement I had for Spring Boot after SpringOne and multiply it by 10. Not only does this build on top of Spring Boot it integrates in all the trendy front end technologies that are in use today. All the pain of bootstrapping and setting up a full on website is taken away while they do all the work for you.

I have been upgrading our Sonar server from 4.5 to 4.5.2 and restructuring our project. I initially was planning on upgrading to SonarQube 5.0, but the upgrade process can’t seem to handle our database. After I upgraded to 4.5.2, I was restructuring. Initially we had each of our libraries setup as a separate project at work and there was a separate sonar project for each one. At one point we decided it was much better to consolidate them all under 1 git repository and make 1 maven master pom with each other project as a module in maven. When we did that we never got around to consolidating our Sonar project to 1 project with sub projects. After we upgraded to intelliJ we found that we couldn’t sue the sonar plugins to integrate with our environment as our project didn’t match our sonar project.