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 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).

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.

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.

I am currently working on a project to move a bunch of data from SQL to Cassandra as the datastore. We have created a Cassandra Framework that looks very similar to the Spring Data JPA Framework that we use for SQL. Our Cassandra Framework we annotate data with @CassandraEntity and @CassandraRepository instead of @Entity and @Repository. For a time the data will live in both the SQL database as well as the Cassandra Cluster at the same time before we drop the SQL table. This will allow us to write to both tables and gradually switch over to the new cluster without as much risk if the cluster falls over.

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 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.

Last Monday I got into the office and I decided that is it, I am going to get our app upgraded to Spring 4.1. I had been working on this off and on for like 9 months, updating dependencies in the pom, doing some testing, wash, rinse, repeat…

As I had mentioned in a previous posts one of the first issues I had was the new aspect j running the hibernate metamodel generator and dumping a bunch of generated class in the root level directory of wherever maven was running. I had opened a Jira against the aspectj-maven-plugin. There was even a user who contributed a patch for the issue, and the developer promised to look at it in January but months went by with no effort to resolve the issue. Now CodeHaus is shutdown and the active projects have moved to MojoHaus. As of yet the aspectj-maven-plugin hasn’t been moved so more and more it looks like my decision to download the code from their SVN repository and fork it on github was correct.

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.