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.

After upgrading my test app to Spring Boot 2.0 yesterday I decided to see how difficult the Java 9 upgrade was from there. I am happy to report that it was fairly trivial. I upgraded my maven pom to set the Java version to 9 and did a mvn clean install.

Immediately I see some no class def exceptions around javax.transaction.Transaction. I did some quick google searching and discovered the problem seems to be in the Maven Surefire plugin. I found a work around that said to set the version to 2.20.1 and added a command line flag of –add-modules javax.transaction. After doing that I was seeing errors around java.xml.bind. Doing some more searching I then added a second –add-modules java.xml.bind. This fixed the issue. In the course of doing so I found a link to the issue on apache’s website. Reading through the comments I ended up with a final configuration of 2.21.0 with the following options:

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.

Upgrading to Java 9

Ever since Java 9 was released last fall, I have been wanting to upgrade our software at work to the new platform. I am not interested in the new module stuff, mostly I just want the convenience methods like List.of(), and the platform improvements. I think G1 by default looks good, the new representation for strings to save memory looks like a huge win, and all the performance numbers that I have seen show it to be a big win. Unfortunately this is not as straight forward as one should hope.

End of year recap

It’s that time again. Time to reflect on my themes for the year and see how I did on them. This is an annual tradition of mine to see how I am doing in general. I find it is a useful accountability tool for myself to make sure I am not wasting too much time on unimportant things and am spending the time that I would like on personal development.

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.

I upgraded to MacOS Sierra, and have really been enjoying the shared clipboard. I haven’t really noticed any other new features that impact my day to day development, however I would advise Java developers to avoid it for the near future. I have searched and searched and I wasn’t coming up with any results. Then I found this blog post. This is definitely part of the problem. I made the host file changes and got a slight boost, but not enough to explain the whole thing.

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.

I hit a bug in Idea 2016.1.2 that I wanted to share in case anyone else is hitting the same issue. I was trying to stand up a new Spring Boot project last week and when I what try to launch the app through the IDE the embedded tomcat server would throw an exception. org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start embedded container; nested exception is org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start EmbeddedWebApplicationContext due to missing EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:133) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:532) ~[spring-context-4.2.6.RELEASE.jar:4.2.6.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.refresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:118) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refresh(SpringApplication.java:766) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.createAndRefreshContext(SpringApplication.java:361) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:307) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1191) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1180) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at com.chooseenergy.auth.AuthApplication.main(AuthApplication.java:14) [classes/:na]Caused by: org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start EmbeddedWebApplicationContext due to missing EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.getEmbeddedServletContainerFactory(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:185) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.createEmbeddedServletContainer(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:158) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:130) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] ... 8 common frames omitted

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.

As my holiday vacation winds down I decided it is time to figure out what my themes are going to be for 2016. Last year I did a fairly good job at hitting the themes I laid out for the year, so I Am curious to see how it will turn out this year.

• The first theme is going to be the same. Regular updates to the blog ideally once a week, though as I saw last year I Didn’t quite make the weekly thing but I did average it given 52 posts. Hopefully I can keep the content somewhat regular this year.
• I want to continue with reading like last year, but that number will for sure drop as we are expecting a baby in February and I know depending on my sleep situation reading may go right out the window.
• At work I would like to migrate to Spring Security 4. This is going to be a bit of an annoying upgrade for us based on some of the changes, but I think this year is the year to bite the bullet and figure it out before we are dealing with Spring 5 in 2017.
• At home I would like to play around with Swift and write my first iOS app. I have been programming Java for 17 years now and I feel like mixing it up a little bit to keep things interesting. I was actually going to work on that over my vacation, but I ended up getting Fallout 4 on the Steam winter sale and messing around with that instead.
• I would like to restructure our webapp at work from an EAR Structure to a WAR structure. If that is successful I would then like to move away from JBoss to Tomcat. And if I got really crazy I would like to end up converting our Spring App to a Spring Boot App which would be a massive restructuring our our application. I think if I could accomplish all of that we would be in a great place going forward, but this is pretty ambitious as a side project and not sure I will be able to find the hours to get us all the way there.
• I think it would be cool to contribute some sort of patch or something into the openjdk or Spring just to say I have contributed there. It just depends if I find enough time to find a small issue and work it out and do so.

At the end of the day whether or not I do any of these things doesn’t matter too much to me. It is sort of just setting some sort of milestones to track how my year is going. The main purpose of this blog is just keeping myself accountable so that I am always sort of improving a little bit each day, so if I find that I have nothing to write about then I can see I am not pushing myself hard enough to learn something new. Here is to another great year.

At the start of the year I posted my Themes for 2015. I decided now is a good time to look at what I was thinking at the start of the year and see how my year turned out. I think it is sort of pointless to set out some ideas of things you want to accomplish if you never stop and assess what you actually did, so this is sort of an accountability post to myself to see how things played out for the year.

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.

As my Christmas vacation draws to a close I am starting to think of themes for 2015. Why themes and not goals or resolutions? Well I think resolutions are sort of setting yourself up for failure and goals are very rigid so I am going with more general themes.

• Obviously the first theme I am working towards will be updating this site at least once a week ideally with something technical that I have learned during the week or thoughts on a problem I am solving.
• Next on the agenda I would like to try to read more. I haven’t been reading as many books as I like to during 2014. But at the end of the year I have been picking up the pace a bit so I hope to read at least 2 books a month. My system I have been using is to try to get through 10% of a book a day on my kindle.
• I would like to spend more time doing stuff in Spring Boot this year. I have been reading Greg Turnquist’s Learning Spring Boot and it is a great book which I strongly recommend. He seems to lay out the information right when I want it in the book and has saved me tons of time that I would have spent digging in the docs for answers otherwise.
• Anyone who knows me know that I am not a big front end person, but as a full stack developer I need to know all the layers of the stack, so I think 2015 is the year that I need to learn Angular JS. I learned Knockout JS in 2014 and appreciated how much more productive it was for things than just jQuery and it seems to me that the market is all going Angular and people say it is more productive than knockout so it is time to give it a try.
• I am hoping to do some architectural updates at work. I am ready to get our stack upgraded (I want to be on Spring 4.1 and Java 8 at a minimum and ideally JPA 2.1 as well instead of 2.0). I always prefer to run the latest stuff so I will be working hard to make sure that I can do so. On that note I submitted a Jira for the issue holding me back on Spring 4.1 related to the aspectj-maven-plugin. With any luck I will be on Spring 4.1 at work within the next 2-3 weeks. Java 8 may take a bit longer as it is going to mean a container upgrade.

Anyway that is what I have come up with so far I am sure more things will apply as time goes on, but this is a good start to my year plan. Now to enjoy my final 2 days of vacation before I return to work.