The Baeldung Weekly Review 10
Last updated: October 1, 2021
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.
Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.
Refactoring big codebases by hand is slow, risky, and easy to put off. That’s where OpenRewrite comes in. The open-source framework for large-scale, automated code transformations helps teams modernize safely and consistently.
Each month, the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne run live, hands-on training sessions — one for newcomers and one for experienced users. You’ll see how recipes work, how to apply them across projects, and how to modernize code with confidence.
Join the next session, bring your questions, and learn how to automate the kind of work that usually eats your sprint time.
Regression testing is an important step in the release process, to ensure that new code doesn't break the existing functionality. As the codebase evolves, we want to run these tests frequently to help catch any issues early on.
The best way to ensure these tests run frequently on an automated basis is, of course, to include them in the CI/CD pipeline. This way, the regression tests will execute automatically whenever we commit code to the repository.
In this tutorial, we'll see how to create regression tests using Selenium, and then include them in our pipeline using GitHub Actions:, to be run on the LambdaTest cloud grid:
The Weekly Review on Baeldung is a curated list of the best stuff I read each week – a handful of articles that are well worth reading (in no particular order).
This is going to be a long one – lots of very good stuff this week – so I’ll cut right to it.
General Musings
=> What TDD Is and Is Not
The fact that TDD contains the word Test in there is more than likely the biggest source of confusion for developers. This is a valiant attempt to dispel the urban myth that TDD is about testing. Nice one.
=> SoftwareDevelopmentAttitude
A mature view on software development – there aren’t many of these around.
=> Calling All Programmer Podcasts
Podcasts were a game changer for me – I started listening to a bunch during a 12 hour layover in Barcelona (yeah) and never looked back. Programming podcasts worth their salt are an underrepresented category – which is why this article is cool bits.
=> IDE vs. Editor
In the famous words of XKCD, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand. If you don’t have a steady hand – check out Bozhos earlier Why Not Emacs? for more insight about why sometimes an IDE is a good needle alternative.
And finally, since these are some of the best parts of my weekly reading (although this review is not going to be short and sweet) – I’ll link to these inline: one is about better dealing with negative feedback, and the other is about keeping an perpetually open mind and lean into learning and making small, incremental improvements. These add up.
Technical
=> CircuitBreaker
The circuit breaker is definitely a solution that should be included into any system that consumes external and potentially unreliable resource – a good pattern if there ever was one. It’s also worth looking at Ray Holders guava-retrying project for something similar.
=> Microservices
Martin Fowler has a page up about micro services. Is it worth a read? What do you think…
=> Please, Run That Calculation in Your RDBMS
A worthwhile (and funny) reminder of the many ways to leverage SQL to calculate things. Es-Queue-El cracks me up even now.
=> Common Text Mining workflow
Text mining can enable some truly interesting things – so I’m always chuffed when I find a good resource like this one.
On Spring
As always, we’ll start with some of the official Spring articles of the week:
- => Deploying Spring Boot Applications – detailed article about the various deployment options that Spring Boot allows – looks to be gearing up to a promising 1.0 release
- => Final Service Release for Spring Data Release Train Babbage – last service release of the previous Spring Data train
- => First service release for Spring Data release train Codd released – and the first release of the current Spring Data train – these really needs no further explanation
- => CVE-2014-0097 Fixed in Spring Security 3.2.2 and 3.1.6 – these service releases fix a recently discovered vulnerability related to LDAP authentication – the time to fix is impressive
- => SpringOne2GX 2013 Replay: Thymeleaf – improving your Spring view layer with natural templates – good intro to Thymeleaf and how to use the templating framework with Spring
=> Websockets with Spring
Interesting read on developing an app with Spring Boot, Spring Integration, RabbitMQ and the new Websocket support in Spring 4.
=> Tracking Exceptions With Spring – Part 2 – Delegate Pattern
Last week I covered a very interesting article about Tracking Exceptions With Spring over on Captain Debug’s blog – this week, I am personally following the second installment of that article and covering it here. The next one is already announced, so this is now officially a series – and a good one at that.
On Java
=> Java 8 Friday Goodies: SQL ResultSet Streams
Very good read about using the new Java 8 Streams API with the JDBC API – a must read. It’s also a little bit sad to think that a more transparent and community driven design process for Java 8 would have saved us a lot of hassle.
=> Concurrency torture: testing your code within the Java Memory Model
An updated take on the age-old problem of testing concurrent logic. Good read (if you can get past the readability issues on the blog).
And that’s it for this review – pick up whichever strikes your fancy and read it back to back – actually engage and pay attention – to get the most out of it.
