It has been a crazy few months in startup land. The interesting thing for me about startups is no matter how crazy it is compared to corporate work, I find myself really content amidst the chaos. The big change here is we have decided to build our backend architecture in Go instead of Java. Having done Java for 19 years this is a big change, but for business decisions we decided that the trade offs with Go were better for our long term business needs than the trade offs with Java. Now that I have been using it for a few months I figured I would discuss some of the differences between the languages and what I like and dislike about each.

We have been discussing going to a more serverless architecture at work and so I decided that I should do some research to see where that stuff is now. When I was at Choose we used AWS Lambda to implement the backend of an abandoned shopping cart service. We would then use that data to drive an email campaign to encourage the users to come back and finish purchasing an energy plan. It had a huge effect in driving conversion rates and we were able to implement the service in about 25 lines of vanilla java code. I opted not to use Spring as I judged the startup times to be too slow for it to be worth it. To manage libraries we used the maven shade plugin in our build process to build a fat jar.

Spring Boot 2.0 has finally arrived. Unfortunately we aren’t yet in a position at the office to be able to begin the upgrade so I decided to start playing around with it on one of my projects at home as I didn’t want to wait until we were ready to update our app.

The first thing I noticed about it they removed findOne() from CrudRepository. This to me is a bad change for all the users of the framework. It is one of the most commonly used methods in Spring Data, and not people either have to refactor their code to use findById() which returns an Optional<> of the type and deal with the optional instead of a null or you have to add a findOne with an @Query to all of your repositories. I have worked on projects in the past that have hundreds of tables and Repositories. This change is forcing them to update hundreds of classes just to upgrade to Spring Boot 2.0. It seems to me a better choice would have been to @Deprecated on findOne and encourage people to upgrade to the new findById method.

I have an update on my slowdown issues on Sierra. It appears the real problem lies in the AWS Java SDK. After talking to the spring boot people via github they were able to narrow it down to an Amazon issue. I opened an issue on github with Amazon and they responded that the version of the SDK that ships in the current spring cloud has this issue in it, and it has been fixed in a newer version of the SDK. One of the big value propositions of Spring Boot to me and the release train concept of Spring Cloud or Spring Data is that it is a collection of dependencies that have all been tested together, which lowers my risk of using them together. So I opened a request with Spring Cloud AWS to upgrade their SDK. Unfortunately they don’t seem very timely in responding to issues as I notice it looks like there are no responses on any of the issues raised in the last 2 weeks.

It has been a crazy couple of months. Since I last posted I made a trip out to San Francisco to meet the rest of the team I work with (and had a great time). If you live in Texas there is no better time to visit San Francisco then at the end of July. It was a welcome break from the heat. I had a great time and realized when I was out there that I hadn’t been out there since 2005, so I was over due for a trip. I had forgotten how much I love that city it is a really fun place to hang out (though not a place I would really want to live).

We’ll do it live..

The big news is our new Spring Boot micro service went into production! It has been running in production for just over a week and we have had 0 issues with it, everything just works! It ended up being two crazy sprints to get it done, but we shipped it this week with no production issues after it went live. My first big project at the new company couldn’t have gone any better. The team really pulled together to get it done which makes it even more rewarding.

The Problem

I have been working on this project to make our app run in any Java Container. Currently we run in JBoss, but ideally I would like the app to work in JBoss or Tomcat, or TomEE or Wildfly. One of the challenges in making this change is to remove JBoss specific dependencies from our app and pull those libs into the webapp as part of our project. We did the first piece of this a couple of years ago when we stopped using JBoss’ version of Hibernate and pulled a newer version into our app. We have since upgraded JBoss versions so this is somewhat moot since the bundled version and our version are the same, but it is one less thing that I will have to deal with as part of this project.

Recently one of my friends was working on a Spring Boot project and he was having trouble finding an example of how to configure user login for his site with Spring Boot using JPA. I had mentioned that there is some mention of configuring security in Greg Turnquist’s book Learning Spring Boot. He had just purchased Spring Boot in Action and I don’t think he was rushing to grab another book, but he hadn’t been able to find a good online tutorial.

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.

One of the most interesting Spring Boot features to me is the Spring Boot Actuator. I just love the concept of having all these restful endpoints to get useful operational data right out of the box. One issue I have had is that I don’t actually know all the endpoints just a few that I have used here and there. Today I saw a link to the Complete Guide for Spring Boot Actuator which is a pretty amazing post that covers everything and anything that you would want to know. The purpose of this post is just so I can go back and find this data later. If you are playing around with Actuators go and check out this post.

I am on a new project at work that looks to be very interesting. I am redesigning our Cassandra layer. Currently we have a beautifully done layer that was designed and implemented by our former architect. It ends up making Cassandra look just like a JPA entity and we have Cassandra Repositories that look just like Spring Data JPA Repositories. After this was in place we discovered the Spring Data Cassandra project. We went to the talk on Spring Data Cassandra and it turns out they had implemented pretty much the system that our architect implemented.

I saw this come across the Spring blog this week. They are going to be doing a webinar for JHipster. As I mentioned in a previous post I am very interested in JHipster as it combines 2 things I am interested in learning Spring Boot and Angular. If you are interested in checking it out sign up here.

Also as a completely unrelated side note, why doesn’t projects.spring.io support HTTPS? This is 2015 and all sites should really support secure access.

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 was messing around with some of the settings in the Java 8 VM. I have been playing around with Spring Boot lately. So I have a minimal webapp in Spring boot, that has a couple of entities, and services and controllers. I have it configured to run as a standalone jar with an embedded tomcat 8 server. When I do a java -server -jar myapp.jar Spring boot launches my app and when it finishes loading the java process is sitting at 870,160K of memory.